Explore unique highlights from UBC’s Open Collections, as well as insights into the work of the Digitization Centre. From announcements of new projects and collections to behind-the-scenes looks at our digitization process, we share the stories and hidden gems that inspire us in our efforts to preserve and make accessible diverse materials.
Jell-o: the culinary curiosities of the twentieth century.
Posted on Jun 13, 2023 by Gage
Jell-o is an affordable dessert that has been enjoyed in Canada and the United States since its creation in the early 1900s. Throughout the years many people have tried experimenting with Jell-o to see what tasty creations they could come up with. This was especially true during the 1940s when many people were trying to […]
Early cartographic misconceptions of Western North America: The island of California and the Sea of the West
Posted on Jun 06, 2023 by Gage
While browsing through the older maps in the Andrew McCormick Maps and Prints collection, or some of the maps of the Americas in the Japanese Maps of the Tokugawa Era collection, you may notice a couple of strange errors. The first of which is that California, through the late 17th and mid 18th centuries, was […]
Cats and Dogs of the Uno Langmann Family Collection
Posted on May 30, 2023 by Gage
The Uno Langmann Family Collection of British Columbia Photographs has over six thousand images that are currently available online. They represent various aspects of B.C.’s social and cultural history during the 19th and 20th centuries. With all of the scary news that goes on in the world, why not take a moment to browse images […]
House Styles
Posted on May 24, 2023 by Gage
Many times, when we at the Digitization Centre are attempting to provide a date range for an image, we often rely on using details from within the image to make an estimate. One of the easier and more reliable details to watch out for are homes. The design of a house allows us to pattern […]
Food Prices of the 1900s in British Columbia
Posted on May 16, 2023 by Gage
With recent skyrocketing food prices, many people find themselves reminiscing of the grocery shopping of yesteryear. The BC Historical Newspaper collection provides many great snapshots of grocery store advertisements throughout the 1900s. Here is a collated selection of various newspapers advertising from around British Columbia. One advertisement was chosen for each decade, and multiple newspapers […]
UBC Library’s Colour our Collections Project
Posted on May 02, 2023 by Marina de Souza
As part of a project to bring the public closer to UBC’s digital and physical collections, UBC Library has joined the Colour Our Collections campaign along with other museums and libraries around the world. Organized by The New York Academy of Medicine, the Colour our Collections project first took off in 2016 to offer a unique way […]
An insight into the digitization of The Shakespeare First Folio Collection
Posted on Apr 25, 2023 by Marina de Souza
This week, as a celebration of William Shakespeare’s birthday (April 23, 1564), the Digitization Centre would like to share some of the experiences of digitizing one of the extremely rare books in the UBC Library’s collections: the first edition of “William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies” published in 1623. We asked one of our graduate students, Natalia […]
Explore Open Collections: French Revolution Collection
Posted on Apr 11, 2023 by Marina de Souza
The Digitization Centre would like to share some exciting news: a rare collection of original pamphlets from the French Revolution is now available on the UBC Open Collections! Total of 114 items were digitized from the UBC Library’s French Revolution Collection which includes pamphlets, plays and documents from between 1787 and 1799, a period of […]
Anyox, British Columbia: A town that got lost, but permeates our collection
Posted on Apr 04, 2023 by Marina de Souza
“Anyox was born quietly but she went out with a bang – or at least the bang heralded the end” (Loudon, 1973, p. 97). That’s how Peter Loudon (1930 – 19-?), one of the 480 settlers born in this copper town describes the brief history and the miscalculated mining explosion that preceded the rapid economic […]
Research in UBC Open Collections: Sex and Migration in the Transpacific Underground
Posted on Mar 22, 2023 by Marina de Souza
The Digitization Centre is always thrilled to learn about the various impressive research findings made through UBC Library’s Open Collections, in particular those collections we have digitized. Knowing how they have impacted the investigation and the educational outcomes of those studies is very gratifying! Today, we would like to share the fascinating open educational resource […]