An Ode to IKBLC
Digitizing content for our digital collections happens five days a week in the basement of the Irving K Barber Learning Centre (IKBLC) on UBC’s Vancouver campus. While we pass many hours in the Digitization Centre (here’s a bit about our work space from 2014), most of the digitization crew also spends a lot of time in IKBLC in general: the building […]
Say Cheese!
Our collections feature thousands of photos, from natural wonders to family portraits, but it’s rare to see the person behind the lens—or even the lens itself. Practically, it makes sense, but nonetheless we love seeing the vintage models and often-smiling faces behind them.
It’s Reading Week here at UBC!
It’s hotly debated whether students use this week to catch up on the homework they’ve neglected, or indulge in the reading-for-fun they put off during the term, or to do absolutely no reading and enjoy all the other activities that Vancouver has to offer. Ironic or not, we’re running with reading as this week’s theme for exploring our collections. Before we share a few of […]
Nanitch Exhibition & Open Collections: See Early Photos of BC online
We are pleased to announce the newest exhibition NANITCH: Early Photographs of British Columbia from the Langmann Collection. Here at Digital Initiatives the Langmann Collection is one of our most popular collections, one that we love to share! The exhibition is a collaboration between the UBC Library and the Presentation House – and a chance for […]
BC Timber Trade: Big Trees and Bigger Dreams
British Columbia was built, in part, on the timber trade. Logging, timber, and surrounding work is something you can find in the collections at DI over and over and over again, starting from 1846 all the way to 2016. In this blog post we’re going to take a look back to when big dreams for […]
How We Digitize: Vintage Vancouver and a Video
We’ve got a special treat for the blog today! An advance peek at new digitizations: This hand tinted shot of Vancouver taken between 1925 and 1933 is from some of the Uno Langmann Collection items awaiting digitization. It is a panorama taken from the Boundary Road and Trinity Street area showing much of Vancouver proper as […]
Extra! Extra! New Uno Langmann Albums Online
We’ve posted about the Uno Langmann BC Historical Photograph Collection before here, here, and here, but now we’ve got even more to talk about! Like, for example, this newly uploaded photo: In case you want a refresher (and to know where this photo originates) – The Uno Langmann BC Historical Photograph Collection, with over 18,000 […]
New album featuring photographs from Carlo Gentile
Another album from the Uno Langmann BC Historical Photograph collection has been uploaded onto our Digital Collections web page! Thirty-six of the photographs in this album were taken by Carlo Gentile (1835-1893), an Italian photographer who immigrated to North America. In 1863 he traveled through the wilds of British Columbia where he photographed Pacific Coast Indians […]
Images make for great seminar materials
The Uno Langmann BC Historical Photograph Digital Collection, consisting of over 15,300 photographs and postcards, is being used in ARTH 443 Issues and Problems in Canadian Art and Photography: Photo Fever and the Uno Langmann Archive, taught by John O’Brian from the Department of Art History.The seminar in Canadian art aims to critically think about how photographs and archives raise […]
Langmann Photo Albums Online
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 […]