chung collection

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 […]

Signs of Summer
The school term is over, finals are over, the sun is shining for more than an hour at a time… We’re spotting signs of summer both outside and in our collections!

Interior Inspiration
Planning a remodel? Want to refresh your decor? You just might catch the renovation bug after checking out these spaces! Perhaps vintage log cabin is your style: nature-inspired and cozy. How about a touch of Spanish flair? Milk glass lighting, plenty of greenery and a mix of stripes with more intricate tile patterns. Go glam nerd — but not too glam — by […]

Digital Collections Reading List
When we came across a “tribute list” in our collections, we couldn’t stop thinking about the Hunger Games trilogy—(Hey! Suzanne Collins! We’d be pretty into another series of districts set on a different continent, or in another time period)—and we realized there were a lot of other times we thought of books related to the collection, too. […]