The Vancouver Maritime Museum joined the Archives Association of British Columbia (AABC) in 2003. In 2004 the Archives was officially named after Leonard G. McCann, Curator Emeritus of the Vancouver Maritime Museum. Mr. McCann joined the Museum in the early 1960s and worked tirelessly until his retirement in 1992. He passed away in 2015. The archival collection has since grown to include several fonds from marine historians and ship’s captains, ships drawings, plans, log books, and other records.

The Vancouver Maritime Museum (VMM) Archives collection consists of archival records donated to the Vancouver Maritime Museum from a wide variety of sources over a period of sixty years since the museum opened. Some of the archival records were originally processed and filed as the Library "ephemera" collection. They have since been removed from the Library database and processed as part of this collection.

The collection consists of correspondence; merchant service and naval certificates; reports and research notes; journals, diaries and logbooks; ledgers; vessel construction plans; photographs and negatives; newsletters, and oral histories recorded on DVD’s and audiocassette tapes. The collection also consists of small collections that were not large enough to be their own stand-alone collections.

The collection has been arranged into 16 series, primarily based on record types.