ProQuest (Historical BC Newspapers)

ProQuest (Historical BC newspapers) (Grades 8-12) includes over 365 million pages of world-class collections, 325 years of historical periodical content, and 350 years of global, national, and regional newspapers. ProQuest gives researchers access to more than 125 years of the historical archives of The Province (1894-2010), the Vancouver Sun (1912-2010), and the Times-Colonist (1884 -2010), including in-depth insights into how stories and perspectives evolved over the decades. Students can review primary source material through local and regional stories, events, and people. ProQuest is accessed through Focused Education Resources and the BC Digital Classroom.

Focused Education Resources is a not-for-profit, shared services organization that supports excellence in K-12 education in British Columbia. It is a consortium of BC public school districts and independent schools that work together to create accessible learning resources for BC schools. Within Focused Education Resources is the BC Digital Classroom, which houses many of the subscriptions available to HCOS and Flex families.

Logging In

There are two steps to log in to ProQuest.

Step 1: Navigate to BC Digital Classroom, then select the ProQuest icon.

Step 2: Enter the username and password for ProQuest from the Subs/Passwords tab in the Search Portal.

Navigation & Use

To begin using ProQuest, you must accept cookies at the bottom of the page. Until you do this, the homepage is grayed out.

You can search for Historical BC Newspapers using a basic or advanced search. You can also search by publications or databases. You can see in the picture below that you are searching three databases. In the advanced search, you can limit your search by source, document type, and language after entering your search terms.

Once you have started a search, you can return to the home page by clicking on the ProQuest logo at the top left.

Select the hamburger menu (three lines) and choose “All Databases (5)” from the drop-down menu. You can also access the Support Center by clicking the button at the bottom of this menu.