Here at the Digitization Centre we are fascinated and excited by the vast amount of primary-source material that our digitization work exposes us to. Whether a document of historic significance, a beautiful illustration, or even a particularly fine typeface, we are frequently amazed by the materials we’re working to share with the world. So much so, that not only will we crowd around to ogle a particularly interesting specimen, but we’ve started decorating our workplace with copies of some of our favorites. But why stop there? Surely, we can’t be the only ones geeky enough to appreciate such “gems” in our collections, and so we’ve decided to share them here with you. Below you will find some of our favorites, hand-picked by staff from both existing and upcoming collections. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do!
TIP: To view full resolution versions of the images on any size screen, click to view in Open Collections.
Tremaine Arkley Croquet Collection Phase 2 Completed
Posted on Aug 19, 2014 by Matthew Murray
We’re excited to announce that the second phase of our Arkley Croquet Collection digitization project has been completed! The collection was donated to the library by Tremaine Arkley, a former player for the U.S. National Croquet Team, and we’ve been scanning paintings, illustrations, engravings, advertisements, photographs, and lots of other items depicting croquet! Here are a […]
UBC Institute of Fisheries Field Records
Posted on Aug 08, 2014 by Matthew Murray
After just over a year of work we’ve recently completed making the UBC Fish Collection notebooks available online! These notebooks contain over 11,000 records featuring data on almost a million different specimens of fish! (If you’re not sure if that’s a lot, it’s the third largest collection of its kind in Canada.) Some of the records […]
Western Manuscripts
Posted on Jul 30, 2014 by Matthew Murray
You may have seen some pages from the Logroño Antiphonary, a 16th century Spanish chant manuscript, showing up on our Flickr account. (If you haven’t, you should go look! It’s a pretty neat example of an illuminated manuscript and features lots of musical notation.) To go along with that manuscript we’ve started scanning some other selections of UBC […]
Langmann Photo Albums Online
Posted on Jul 23, 2014 by Matthew Murray
We announced earlier this year that we were going to be digitizing a huge collection of photos and postcards that were donated to us by local art dealer Uno Langmann. This is quite a large project, but we’ve been diligently working away at scanning images, and creating metadata for each of them! We’re happy to […]
Check out our Impact and Activity Report
Posted on Jul 21, 2014 by Mimi Lam
We are pleased to present the Digitization Centre Impact and Activity Report! The impact and activity report describes the work of members of our unit as well as the relationships built with UBC researchers, students and community partners since the Centre’s opening in March 2011. Some highlights from the report: • More than 500,000 items […]
Memories of the First World War
Posted on Jul 10, 2014 by Matthew Murray
2014 is the centenary of the First World War. The war started in late July of 1914 and commemoration of the war and the people who died will begin at the Bastille Day celebrations in France on July 14th. While there will undoubtedly be more posts about this in the next four years, we figured we’d show […]
A decade of Discorder digitized!
Posted on Jun 25, 2014 by Matthew Murray
A few months ago we let you know that we were going to start digitizing Discorder, the music magazine published by UBC’s community radio station CiTR. Well, we’ve just about completed digitizing every issue from the 1980s (and might well be finished by the time you read this), so we figured now might be a […]
The Power of the Letter
Posted on Jun 24, 2014 by Rob
Letters can provide insights in to the details of lives which have otherwise been documented in the extreme. Case in point, Charles Darwin, regarded as the progenitor of modern evolutionary theory. His work in this area is widely known but he also had many other interests including the study of insectivorous plants such as Drosera […]
Moving Spaces
Posted on Jun 17, 2014 by Matthew Murray
As you might have heard we’ve been planning on expanding into a new space for several months. It finally happened on Friday, and we’re mostly moved in now! Here’s the room we’re moving into. I wish we’d taken some photos when it was just a vast empty white room before the carpet was installed. Here […]
Remembering the Empress
Posted on Jun 11, 2014 by Matthew Murray
We marked the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Empress of Ireland, one of the worst naval disasters in Canadian history.
