Yvonne Chan
Explore Open Collections: Emma Crosby Letters
Beyond our personal reservations regarding evangelism and the missionary enterprise, Emma Crosby Letters collection is exceptionally interesting because it lets us see two very different perspectives on how women lived in the 19th century and on their personal struggles. On one side, we can see how the gender limitations of the time made it impossible […]
Explore Open Collections: Dorothy Burnett Bookbinding Tools
Dorothy Burnett was the first independent artisan bookbinder to set up shop in Vancouver. Her friendship with Anne Yandle, previously head of Special Collections at UBC, compelled Burnett to choose our library to house a rich collection of 224 of her most treasured artifacts used in her bookbinding career. As an example of the Dorothy Burnett […]
Traveling in the BC Bibliography collection
As a co-op student working at UBC Library Digital Initiatives Unit I get to see incredibly interesting materials that I would never see otherwise. Have I ever thought, for example, of reading anything by Daniel M. Gordon? No, never, not before digitizing his book Mountain and Prairie, A Journey from Victoria to Winnipeg, Via Place […]
What do hedgehogs and cats have in common?
They both play croquet, apparently! Digital Initiatives is currently digitizing selected images from the Arkley Croquet Collection, which is housed in UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections. The Arkley Croquet Collection contains more than 2,000 images taken from a variety of media and dates from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. As […]
The Okanagan Historical Society Reports
The annual reports of the Okanagan Historical Society are now available as a digital collection. There are 69 issues in the collection, dating back to 1926 and continuing until 2007. The issues are fully searchable online and available for download as PDF documents. The Okanagan Historical Society has always been active in promoting the history […]
Update of Bullock Webster Collection
The Bullock Webster collection has been updated with new high-quality images. The original material, an album filled with watercolour and ink sketches, is very delicate. As such, the digital collection up until now was composed of scans we made of the old access photographs. Although we tried to make these scans represent the original sketches […]
Delgamuukw Trial Transcripts
For Aboriginal (Un)History Month, we are featuring our digital collection of the Delgamuukw trial transcripts, which document a landmark case in British Columbian and Canadian history. The Delgamuukw case began in 1984 with the Gitxan and Wet’suwet’en Nations claiming ownership and jurisdiction over 58,000 square kilometres […]
Keenlyside
This image is from the Augustus Pemberton collection, one of two collections donated to Rare Books and Special Collections by John Keenlyside in 2008. We are currently digitizing both collections, and they should appear on the Rare Books and Special Collections website in the near future. The image is of a calendar of prisoners who […]
The Prolific David Conde
One of our current projects is to digitize the David Conde fonds in partnership with the University of Tokyo. We are discovering first hand that David Conde was a hugely prolific journalist who had much to say about a lot of subjects. As such, the David Conde fonds contains vast quantities of manuscripts for books […]
RG 10: Department of Indian Affairs Letterbooks Project
Update on project: Due to various reasons, the RG 10 Departmental Letterbooks Project did not move beyond the pilot stage. The RG 10 Departmental Letterbooks Project is a collaborative venture between the University British Columbia Library and the University Library, University of Saskatchewan to digitize, describe and provide online access to a volume of Department […]