Historical photographs

Interested in Burnaby's Past? 

Were you ever curious to see a picture of the railroad station in Barnet? Did you know that Miss Harriet Woodward ran a private school at Deer Lake in 1904? Perhaps you wondered about the farms at Oakalla? The Burnaby Public Library Bob Prittie Metrotown Branch Special Collections has items which will interest you. These include  the Burnaby Public Library Historical Photograph Collection, the Burnaby Public Library Contemporary Visual Archive Project Photo Collection Catalogue  and the Burnaby Heritage Resource Inventory:Metrotown .

The Burnaby Public Library Historical Photograph Collection  (R971.133 Bur) is a small but important collection of 190 photographs of Burnaby people, places, and events, donated primarily by the Burnaby Historical Society. The photographs cover a broad time period beginning with an 1865 picture of Robert Burnaby and ending with a picture of BCIT taken in the 1960s. An index to the collection has been entered into an in-house database and can be searched by subject, decade or planning area. Most of these photographs are available in digital format on the Heritage Burnaby site. You may look at the binders of photos in the library by leaving your library card at the information desk on the second floor.

The library also has a Local History Slide Collection of some of these photos on two carousels of slides, originally from the Burnaby Historical Society. The slide collection is available for borrowing and may be used for public viewing. 

The Burnaby Public Library Contemporary Visual Archive Project  was initiated by the library in 1976,  and was done in conjunction with Simon Fraser University Communication students. Its aim was to present a photographic view of Burnaby in 1976. The original collection of 500+ photos is now located at the Burnaby Archives and they have been digitized on the Heritage Burnaby site. Photocopies of these photos can be viewed at  the Bob Prittie Metrotown Branch in the Burnaby Public Library Contemporary Visual Archive Project Photo Collection Catalogue (R971.133 Bur) . Indexes by name of street, park, business or general subject heading are available.

If you live in the Metrotown area, you might be interested in seeing the photographs of heritage buildings and homes that were used for the book Burnaby Heritage Resource Inventory: Metrotown (R971.133 Bur). The Burnaby Historical Society compiled this inventory of homes, buildings and structures that date from the late 1890s to the early 1900s.