BC ARTISTS: First BC Artist document

25th Anniversary of the first BC Artists document

I was looking through a binder of early research material for BC Artists and Looking For Maud, and came across some notes that I'd made on December 28 1998. After I'd done a fair bit of research, and wanted a way to keep the information organized, I started thinking about doing a digital database. This was my first attempt at describing a web site concept and its components. My first thought was correct: "too much work!" It was December 2002 before I actually started writing the web pages, and 22 years later I am still adding them.

I started building the website by listing artists who exhibited in Vancouver from 1890 to 1950, which seemed like a reasonable time frame. Once I realized how many artists there were it was too late to go back. For a while I was actually compiling an index to individual artworks as I transcribed exhibition catalogues, but it was very time consuming and not really necessary. Dividing the project into multiple time periods didn't make sense. I didn't expand the project past 1950 until I had completed inputting much of the information prior to 1950, which took me 10 years.

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