This post is part of our series on resources featuring the names of B.C. places used as room names in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. The place we would like to feature for this post is Bamfield, a community on the coast of Barkley Sound on Vancouver Island, and well known for the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre.
Suppose you want to find references in historical newspapers to Bamfield. If you search the library catalogue for serial publications and the keyword “Bamfield,” you will find that the furthest back any of our newspaper holdings published in Bamfield go are only to the 1970’s and 80’s. Besides, there could have been articles written in other B.C. towns and cities about Bamfield.
There is a great resource provided by the UBC Library Digital Initiatives department that can help! BC Historical Newspapers is an online database for a number of digitized newspapers. You can browse by title of newspaper, date, or even better for this situation, full text search the newspapers. Here is a screenshot of what a search for “Bamfield” looks like:
Searching BC Historical Newspapers for Bamfield
As you can see, the database highlights your keywords and also gives you the name of the newspaper and the date the article is from. Click on the result to read the actual digitized article- the database will zoom in to where the highlighted word is located. For example, if you replicate this search and click on the article from the Cumberland News on October 8, 1902, you will read that the laying of the trans-Pacific cable line off the ship Colonia was about to begin from Bamfield. This marked the establishment of the Pacific Cable Board Cable Station, which would later become the site of the above-mentioned Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre. Give searching the BC Historical Newspapers a try with another British Columbia town!
In the Barber Centre, the Bamfield Meeting Room is number 157, located on the first floor of the building.