I’m very excited to say that the Columbian Newspaper has finally made their digital archives available online to the public. This is going to be a great resource for people like me who like studying Vancouver history. Before this I would have to either search the Oregonian’s digital archives for information on Vancouver or I would have to trudge up to the 4th floor of the downtown library to search old issues of the Columbian using microfiche. If you don’t know what microfiche is, consider yourself lucky. Microfiche became popular in the 1970s as a way to store microimages of print media on flat pieces of film. You would then use a microfiche scanner to view the microfiche. The biggest problem with microfiche, from my perspective, is that you can’t search the text for keywords.
The Columbian digital archives from 1890 to 2011 are available online at columbian.newspapers.com for a cost of just $7.95 a month. Or you can access the archives via a computer at the Clark County Historical Museum for the price of admission.