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chung collection
Objects of the Canadian Pacific Railway
Did you know that we have some of the items in our collections because of a lazy dishwasher? Several Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) items in the Chung Collection were bought by Dr. Chung from a scuba diver. The CPR had many diverse businesses, including cruises, and apparently some crew members were so tired of washing […]
How Are Collections Made?
While browsing through our digital collections, you might start wondering how all of these items originally came together. Every collection has its own unique story, and we’ve chosen to highlight two such stories in this week’s post. Maybe it will motivate you to start your own collection! Chung Collection The Chung Collection currently has […]
Chung Collection Menus: A Flavour Throwback
Restaurant and hotel menus are windows to the past. When looking at old menus, you can learn about what kinds of foods people used to prefer, what kinds of produce was available, what was considered to be an elaborate dish, and how much people used to pay for food. The Chung Collection contains hundreds of […]
Graphic art in the Chung Collection
If you take a look at the Canadian Pacific Railway Company posters in our Chung Collection, you’ll be amazed by all of the wonderful paintings depicting early and mid 20th-century travel in Canada. These promotional posters were created to attract tourists to the many trains, hotels, world cruises, Canadian tours, and airplanes owned by Canadian […]
Family Day
February 12 is Family Day in British Columbia. While this statutory holiday was created in BC in 2013, falling on the second Monday every February, it has existed in other parts of Canada for even longer. The very first province to observe Family Day as a statutory holiday was Alberta in 1990, when Family Day […]
Winter Olympics
The 2018 Winter Olympics are starting this week! They are going to be hosted by PyeongChang in South Korea, beginning on February 9, 2018. For 16 days, we will see the best winter sports athletes in the world compete for gold. To get into the sportive spirit, we selected a few materials from our collection […]
A New Year Calls for a New Impact Report!
We are pleased to present the Digitization Centre Impact and Activity Report for 2016-2017! This report highlights the Digitization Centre’s key projects, partnerships and user engagement trends for the 2016-2017 fiscal year. In 2016-2017, Open Collections accounted for 15% of the Library’s unique pageviews. That 15% totals 3.9 million pageviews on Open Collections alone! The […]
Slice of Life: Menus from the Chung Collection
The Chung Collection within Open Collections is known for its variety of photos and subjects. Recently, we took a journey through the menus within the collection- here are a few for your enjoyment: Does anyone know what the first a la carte menu item- “Chow Chow- 15” is? I’d be willing to try […]
Happy Thanksgiving!
We hope you enjoy the long weekend, good food, and this tour through parties and Thanksgivings past in our collections: in 1888, the Regina Lodge in Vancouver was charging $4 to attend a Social Ball and Supper: Turkey was the thing by 1913, as Women’s Words of Western Canada encourages a poultry raising cottage industry: […]
What’s Old is New Again
The objects within Open Collections are beautiful, often rare, and allow connection with history as only primary sources can. As your humble blog correspondent, I am consistently struck with how different things were, yet what we are interested in, our concerns, and struggles are the same. This week, let’s see what the past has to […]
