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The study examines W.K. Lamb's administration of the Provincial Archives of British Columbia from 1934 to 1939. Such a study is justified on the grounds that little is known about the few public archives that had been established by the 1930s. Despite difficult financial circumstances of the time, Lamb transformed the rather ill-administered Archives Department of the Legislative Library into a distinct, vital provincial archives by organizing the collections so that they could be properly used, the staff so-they could be productive and the finances of the whole department so that the needs of the work could be demonstrated. Lamb's greatest concern was to make the Archives accessible to historical researchers and the public at large. A major thrust of his efforts may be found in his establishment of the British Columbia Historical Quarterly; under his editorship it became a widely respected historical journal which brought readable, scholarly history to a wide readership and publicized the collections and work of the Archives. To understand Lamb's efforts in this regard, it is important to examine his own early life and university studies in British Columbia and Europe. Lamb's early writings, and his reviews of historical works give a good idea of Lamb's view of history and his favourite subjects. Unpublished reports of the Provincial Library and Archives as well as correspondence between Lamb and Ireland, Lamb and various amateur historians and colleagues tell the story of the development of the Archives and the Quarterly venture. Interviews with Dr. Lamb himself helped set the tone for the study and filled in many gaps in the research.

Visible light communications (VLC) have been proposed as a complementary technology in vehicular networks due to its several merits including high security, high scalability than RF technology. Notably, the RF technology established for vehicular networks best known as the dedicated short-range communications, supports many applications but doubts still exist on the capability of this technology to meet the low latency (where not more than 20 ms is required for pre-crash sensing and cooperative collision mitigation) and high reliability requirements in intelligent transport systems (ITS), when considering issues such as network outages as well as security issues. Of interest is the wide increase in the use of light emitting diode (LED)-based vehicle and traffic lights, and cameras in vehicles (rear and dashcams), traffic and security cameras, hence opening more opportunities for the VLC technology as part of ITS. Remarkably, camera-based VLC (i.e., optical camera communications) offers even further capabilities such as vehicle localization, motion and scene detection and pattern recognition. \ud However, the VLC system has few challenges that needs addressing for the practical implementation of this technology as part of ITS. Consequently, this thesis focuses on addressing the key challenges and proposing novel technical analytical and experimental solutions. Firstly, increasing the robustness to sunlight induced noise is one of the major challenges in vehicular VLC, hence this thesis proposes an infrared (IR) transmission, as the amount of solar irradiance is lesser in the IR band than in the visible band. Performance of the proposed scheme is validated through numerical simulations with realistic emulated sunlight noise from empirical measurement. \ud Investigations on the effects of turbulence with aperture averaging and fog on vehicular VLC is also carried out via experiments. Secondly, increasing the communication range is another major challenge, consequently the feasibility of using different vehicle taillights (TLs) as the VLC transmitter are evaluated via simulations based on empirical measurements of the radiation characteristics and transmit powers of the TLs. Results obtained indicate that, only a very low link span of < 10 m are achievable at data rates of 2-10 Mbps due to their low transmit power. Thus, the inclusion of IR-LEDs in headlights and TLs to provide the needed transmit power levels (within eye safety limits) required for longer transmission spans is proposed. Notably for the proposed IR-vehicular link, a link span of up to 63, 72, and > 89 m at the forward error correction (FEC) bit error rate (BER) limit of 3.8 × 10-3, compared to 4.5, 5.4, and 6.3 m for the BMW vehicle-based TL at data rates of 10, 6, and 2 Mbps are achieved under realistic sunlight conditions. While, to increase the communication distance of camera-based VLC links, reducing the spatial bandwidth of the camera in its out of focus regions is proposed, mathematically analysed, and experimentally demonstrated where up to a 400 m link span at a 100 % success reception rate is achieved at a data rate of 800 bps, which is the longest so far reported. \ud Relay-assisted links are also investigated using amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying schemes under the emulated sunlight noise. A mathematical and simulation-based system model is developed, where different transmitter/receiver geometries are considered and AF and DF schemes. Results obtained via simulations shows that the DF scheme is a suitable candidate for vehicular VLC connectivity under emulated sunlight noise, offering at the FEC BER limit of 3.8 × 10-3 up to 150 % increase in the link distance by the end of the 2nd hop. Proof of concept experimental demonstration of AF and DF schemes for vehicular VLC are also carried out showing that DF is the preferred option. Moreover, insights are provided into the impact of various system parameters on the relay-assisted links. Finally, increasing the mobility of the vehicular VLC system is another major challenge, hence analysis on the required angular field of view (AFOV) for vehicular links considering necessary geometry parameters is investigated. Mathematical expressions to determine the required AFOV based on key system parameters are also derived. Furthermore, the relevance of the choice of the receiver parameters for an enhanced AFOV is also analysed, consequently a means to mitigate the effects of beam spot offset induced power losses at the photodiode caused by the misalignment of the transmitter and imaging receiver is proposed.