As the archivist for the CBC in Vancouver, Colin Preston looks after more than 250,000 items and programmes on film and videotape. And, as he’ll tell you, it’s the best historical archive of film footage west of Toronto.
Preston says that over the last decade staff has been shoveling all this archival material into a common database that’s searchable through the CBC’s Intranet. The hope is that one day it will eventually be publicly accessible through the Internet.
Still, it’s a wonderful source of information about a much older Vancouver and it’s another source for anyone looking for footage of an old house or neighbourhood.