Crime, Cults, and Murder in Open Collections: Sources on Historical Crime
The staff at the Digitization Centre provide suggestions and insights into how researchers can learn more about historical crime in BC on UBC Open Collections. Whether you’re interested in crime, cults, legal records or Gold Rush era con-men, this blog post offers researchers a place to start looking when looking into the darker sides of BC’s history.
Teach Me How: Basic Advanced Searching
This week we are taking a dive into Open Collections to highlight more tips and tricks for doing research in UBC Open Collections. This blog post covers some more advanced search techniques, so if you have not already, we strongly recommend you check out our previous blog posts on how to search Open Collections. Example […]
Mining in British Columbia
In this week’s blog post, we’ll take a brief look at the history of coal mining in British Columbia and its impact on the region’s industrial landscape. All the materials featured in this post can be found in our open collections. Please feel free to click the captions underneath the photos attached to this blog […]
Wildfire Prevention in B.C. Historical Newspapers: 1904-1981
A comparatively warm and dry winter here in British Columbia has experts predicting a bad year for wildfires across the province. While wildfires have always been a natural part of British Columbia’s seasonal cycle, increasing seasonal average temperatures and decreased precipitation are contributing to longer, more widespread and more destructive wildfire seasons, with four of […]
Newspaper Articles on Early Paleontological Findings in Western Canada
UBC’s Open Collections contains hundreds of thousands of materials covering a vast number of topics, making it an amazing resource for anyone with historical research interests. Personally, I find great joy in interest driven research, and one collection in particular that often returns excellent materials is the BC Historical Newspaper Collection. This week I was […]
Vintage Advertisements from the BC Historical Newspapers Collection: 1899-1950
Looking back at old advertisements can not only be extremely entertaining, but can also provide fascinating insight into commonly accepted knowledge during a given era. Historically, lack of advertising laws or regulations resulted in exaggerated, dishonest and extreme claims being made in attempts to sell products. Advertisers were able to claim almost anything they pleased […]
A selection of Poems and Poetry from Open Collections
Poetry is a very popular form of literary work that appears frequently in many different places within Open Collections. For this weeks blog post I have search for examples from a handful of publications to share. The genre of poems vary wildly and even within this small sample there are love poems, rhyme poems for […]
Classified ads of the bygone days in the Aldergrove star
For this weeks blogpost I decided to return to the BC Historic Newspapers collection in order to find something from the past to write on. In my opinion, the most interesting part of the newspaper is Classified ads where people place advertisements for all the goods and services they are looking to buy, sell, and […]
Jell-o: the culinary curiosities of the twentieth century.
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 […]
Food Prices of the 1900s in British Columbia
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 […]