Burnaby's pioneers have the chance to speak again, but it won't take a psychic medium to make it happen.

Residents will soon find out what these voices of the city's past had to say when last interviewed through a project by the Burnaby Archives.

The Burnaby Oral History Digitization Project was able to proceed due to a grant from the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at the University of British Columbia.

"It was able to take us beyond what we're able to do," city archivist Arilea Sill says of the $10,000 grant, which was awarded last month.

Now, instead of just digitizing and preserving the tapes and reels containing more than 100 hours of interviews with Burnaby's pioneers, the archives is able to put the recordings on HeritageBurnaby.ca and make the interviews searchable, she says.

While the digitization should take about two more weeks to complete, it'll take until the end of the summer or so to compile and upload everything onto the website, Sill says.

The interviews were conducted in the '70s and '80s, capturing the memories of Burnaby's settlers before they passed away. Some of those interviews were done by late Burnaby historian Pixie McGeachie.

"She did a lot of the interviews," Sill says. "It's a neat little tie-in."

The archives didn't have the right equipment to listen to the interviews, so it was a priority to get digital recordings made, she says.

The interviews will be searchable, both in sections and in their entirety, she adds.

"What we're planning to do is make them searchable like the photos," she explains.

The Heritage Burnaby website includes a collection of 2,000 archival photographs.

This isn't the first of the archives' project that highlights Burnaby's past using modern technology.

Charting Change: An Interactive Atlas of Burnaby's Heritage tied with a Smithsonian Institute project last year for ArchivesNext's award, Best Repurposing of Digitized data.

The grant for the oral history project was provided through the learning centre's British Columbia History Digitization Program, which provided $180,000 in grants this year for 21 projects.

The program is in its fifth year and has provided $820,000 for 98 projects throughout the province since it began.

Chris Hives, university archivist at UBC's library, is the coordinator for the program.

The funding goes towards preserving all kinds of historical material, he says.

"It's unique, in that sense," he says of the program, adding other funding is specifically oriented to libraries or archives and is not as broad.

While Hives and others with the program can provide guidance on how to apply and how to present projects and funding requests, the primary role of the program is to provide financial support, he says.

"Primarily, we're just the purse strings for the project," Hives says.

The program provides half the funding for projects, while applicants can put forward half of their portion in in-kind services, as well as at least 25 per cent of cash.

"It's good in terms of maximizing the investment in the community," he says.

Those wishing to apply should do so well in advance, he adds. Applications are generally accepted up until the end of the calendar year. Irving K. Barber donated more than $20 million to develop the learning centre, which runs the program.