More than 50,000 Citizen newspaper photo assignments generated more than half a million images between 1970 and 2000.
Those Prince George Citizen negatives have now been donated to The Exploration Place where they are stored in specially designed condensible shelves in acid-free envelopes in acid-free boxes, which will always be handled with cotton-gloved hands.
"And we already have about 700,000 images in our collection," said Alyssa Tobin, curator at The Exploration Place.
So this addition will put them well over a million images.
"We've known for a little while that these were going to be donated to us so when we purchased our brand-new shelving we left space for it," said Tobin.
Next steps include organizing the collection and finding a way to make it easy to access, she added.
"Then further into the future it would be great to scan the collection and have it searchable in our database," said Tobin.
Many people have come into the museum and mentioned the Prince George newspaper digitization project that is available online through the Prince George Public Library web site.
The digitization project prompts people to come to The Exploration Place to access the negatives of the photos people are viewing online.
"This means that more people will have access to them and that will make research much more convenient," said Tobin.
"I think that's really exciting and way in the future - but I'd like this to be done as soon as possible - I'd like to link these photos on our database to the Prince George Public Library's digitization of the newspapers. I don't know how that would be possible but I'd love to find a way to make that happen."
