Canadian Underwriter magazine launches special insurance industry archive website

Canadian Underwriter magazine is celebrating its 80th Anniversary in 2014. To acknowledge this milestone, the Canadian Underwriter staff dove into the archives and agreed that it would be a an exciting project to preserve and share a snapshot of the magazine’s content from each of its 80 years covering the industry.

Since the beginning of the year, the Canadian Underwriter team has been working on this 80th Anniversary project and is excited to now launch a new archive website called CU80Years.com.

“In creating the site, the staff looked through the archive bound copies of each year’s issues from 1935 to 2007 and had various pages of interest scanned – including Covers, Articles and Advertisements,” says Steve Wilson, senior publisher of Canadian Underwriter.

“Unfortunately, there are a few years missing from the archives – including the first year of publication, 1934 – but the vast majority of the magazine’s history is represented.”

For the more recent years of 2008 to 2014, full digital editions of each issue have been embedded on CU80Years.com and can be expanded for full-screen reading.

The content at CU80Years.com is shareable online – specifically, each individual image is easily shareable via the major social media channels using the share widgets on the site.

CU80Years.com is best experienced on the most updated version of your Internet browser. The responsive site can also be viewed across mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets.

“Because the magazine’s history is the industry’s history, we will be adding a new ‘Reader Submitted’ section to each year from 1935 to 2007,” Wilson notes.

“At the site, there is a ‘Submit Your Photos’ tab, and we encourage readers within the industry to upload their own historical industry photos to the site – and help create a further sense of community and add context and depth to the content for each year.”

“We hope that everyone connected to the industry – past, present and future – will enjoy this ‘virtual time machine’ created by Canadian Underwriter magazine for the Canadian property and casualty insurance market – and find looking back at the history of our industry as fascinating and enlightening as we do,” Wilson says.

“CU80Years.com will continue to be updated and enhanced long after the anniversary year has ended. Please check back often and share with your colleagues.”