HISTORY | NEWSLETTERS & IMAGES

Community and Work Life; Britannia Beach 1967 – 1974

The BC Museum of Mining has over 5000 images in our collection and it is our goal to find the best way to give them meaning. We hope that this digitization project is the first of many that we continue to develop. Every museum needs to get its first digitization project under its belt, as there is so much to learn about providing this type of public access to collections. The project was in response to community pride rather than scholarly research but we hope that there is usefulness inherent in the historic resources we decided to showcase. We are pleased that we were able to find the resources and volunteer support to begin our digitization journey.

Sample Images 1967-1974

We choose for digitization the Anaconda Collection and the Britannia community newsletters, both from the period of 1967 – 1974. Together they illustrate a period of Britannia Beach’s history, right before the Mine closed. After closure, Britannia dramatically changed and many of the community’s activities, parades, and diverse social life began to be redefined. On many levels Britannia’s rich history is key to how the village of 300 residents still defines itself today.

Key to the success of this project was the commitment of Trish McNair, a life long Britannia Beach resident. Trish was interested in the content of the newsletters and volunteered to transcribe them so that others could enjoy and learn from them. The project could not have gone forward without the financial support from the BCMA‘s Digitization grant, which allowed us to hire the expertise we needed to digitize the images and advise on process.

Take a peak into how life was in a resource based costal community. We hope you enjoy spending some time with the historic resources from a very different time period that occurred not so long ago.