Collections

The LOI digital archive collections are the culmination of a four-year intensive research period conducted by project members. It includes a diverse array of materials from archival and government records to oral histories as well as land title records and transcribed directories. This archive boasts a total of 34,929 HTML documents, including 8878 archival and newspapers files, and 141 interviews (see Statistics).

We have extracted a number of collections of particular interest and for which we have done additional work from their archival home and present them here as self-titled collections. The archival "home" for each of these special collections is provided in the collection's landing page: Custodian Case Files, Protest Letters, Fishing Boat Ledger, Fishing Vessel Request Letters, and in the Miscellaneous collection Suspicious Persons Report, Steveston history, Haney history, Mission history. The remaining files selected from archival institutions appear in the Archival Collections area of this site. You can see the landing page for any collection by clicking on the collection name in the boxes below.

The easiest way to navigate this gigantic archive is to use the search. Most of the collections below have a search button below that allows visitors to perform targeted searches within that set of records. A search across the entire archive is available from the home page. Search, however, has some limitations. If a word or phrase, for example, has not been transcribed or recorded in the collection content or metadata, the search won’t return any results. Visitors may then wish to browse the collections. Each collection has its own description and instructions on browsing and navigating the structure that can be viewed by clicking the browse buttons below.