The General Treaty of Fish, known in French as Traité général des pesches, was written by Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau and Jean-Louis De La Marre between 1769 and 1782. It focuses largely on the boats, equipment and techniques of fishermen in France during the era, including fine details about various species of fish. The text focuses primarily on the fishing industry in France.

Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau was a well-respected physician, engineer and botanist during France’s Enlightenment era, who was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1728. He also founded a school for maritime engineers, and is recognized today as one of the forerunners of modern agronomy. The Traité général des pesches is an important historical work which provides unique insight into the practices around fishing in France during the mid-to-late 18^th century.

Enjoy these wonderful images, and click here to explore the entire collection!

Detailed illustrations of line tying

Illustrations depicting the techniques for netting fish

Making nets

Illustration of a Cormorant bird

Processing fish

The Shad fish

Getting fish to market

The Carp fish

Large sailing and cargo ships – includes an image of a birch bark canoe

International Students’ Day is celebrated annually on November 17. It is a day of both commemoration and celebration: a chance to recognize the 1939 Nazi German storming of Czech universities and the resulting arrests and deaths of hundreds of students; and a chance to celebrate and support the continued activism of student communities around the world today.

Here at the Digitization Centre, we’ve decided to feature some of our collection items which highlight student activism at UBC over the course of the last several decades. Student protests, sit-ins and other forms of activism give voice to the needs and rights of UBC’s student body, and have, at times,  led to widespread and progressive institutional change.

Perhaps the earliest student protest at UBC was known as the Great Trek, when nearly 1,200 students marched from downtown Vancouver to the unfinished Point Grey campus to protest government inaction on construction of the new university. To learn more about the Great Trek, check out this article from The Ubyssey.

Great Trek at Georgia and Granville streets, 1922

In 1968, due to overcrowding on-campus and a perceived lack of long-term vision for higher education in the province, over 1,000 students staged a massive sit-in to “liberate” UBC’s Faculty Club. The atmosphere of resistance and unrest coincided with a visit by American activist Jerry Rubin, and was no doubt informed by the radical activism taking place on university campuses across the border in the United States. As a result of the sit-in, a campus-wide day of reflection took place in order to address student concerns, and student involvement in the University’s governing bodies increased. For more information on this interesting period in the University’s history, click here and here.

Student sit-in at Faculty Club, 1968

Student sit-in at Faculty Club, 1968

Student sit-in at Faculty Club, 1968

The Ubyssey, October 25, 1968

The Ubyssey, October 25, 1968

Other forms of action and activism have taken place at UBC campus in the intervening years, and we will undoubtedly see more such events in the future.

School of Architecture paint-in, 1974

Student Robin Wiley speaking at tuition fee increase protest, 1995

Point Grey beach erosion protestors prevent start of erosion control project, 1974

Students sitting on floor of Administration building, ca. 1970

A number of our smaller collections here at UBC Library contain truly interesting and unique content that provides insightful historical perspective on early British Columbian history. Today we’re highlighting one such example: the Archibald Murchie Collection is made up of more than 50 photographs taken in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s by “B.C.’s Evangelist photographer”.

Yale, B.C., ca. 1900

Ten horse team skidding logs, between 1890 and 1910

These photographs feature imagery from the Cariboo and Similkameen regions of the province, highlighting the infrastructure projects and development in these areas by early settlers. Bridge, dam and railroad construction projects figure prominently, as do landscape shots of the growing cities, scenes of crews at work, and local First Nations peoples.

Lytton, B.C., between 1890 and 1910

First Nations family outside their home in Chilliwack, B.C., between 1890 and 1910

First wheelbarrow in Cariboo, B.C., between 1890 and 1910

Archibald Murchie (1852-1930) was a Scottish immigrant and evangelist minister for the Spiritualist Church, an off-shoot of the Church of England. In the late 1800’s he decided to preach as a missionary in B.C.’s interior, and around the same time was hired to photograph the construction of a bridge over the Fraser River at Sheep Creek. As construction proved to be fairly slow, Murchie took the opportunity to travel to surrounding regions and photograph the growing towns and cities that were sprouting up. After a failed attempt at leading his own parish in Princeton, B.C., Murchie set up a photography studio in Ashcroft, B.C., eventually marrying and relocating to the Okanagan Valley.

Bridge construction in progress at Sheep Creek on the Fraser River, between 1890 and 1900

Stagecoach at 100 Mile House, B.C., between 1890 and 1910

First Nations men and women on riverbank, between 1890 and 1910

At his death in 1930, Murchie’s widow remarried and destroyed all of his photographic equipment. It was only by chance that, in 1948, several glass plate negatives were recovered from a chicken house under repair. Another interesting fact: Archibald’s brother was the founder of the now well-known local company, Murchie’s Tea & Coffee.

Man with dogs in snowy forest, between 1890 and 1910

Princeton, B.C., between 1890 and 1910

Men loading bobsled with logs near Westbank, B.C., ca. 1910

This collection is housed at UBC Okanagan Library’s Special Collections and Archives, and is a part of the Doug and Joyce Cox Research Collection. To view more images from the Archibald Murchie collection, click here!

It’s Open Access Week 2016, a chance to celebrate practices that promote Open Access, Open Data and Open Education. This year’s theme is “Open in Action”, an opportunity to highlight key activities that the academic and scholarly community is taking to support and expand open access initiatives.

Here at the Digitization Centre we are proud to value the principles of openness, and are always looking into ways we can improve our participation and expand our contribution. To celebrate Open Access Week 2016, we’ve released the Digitization Centre’s 2015/2016 Impact Report! In this latest assessment, you can learn about all of the interesting projects we’ve been working on over the past 12 months, and some of the great content that has been digitized.

Detail of page from One Hundred Poets | 百人一首

The report highlights the exciting launch of our online digital portal Open Collections in October 2015, and includes statistics on the number of unique site visits to the portal, as well as our most popular collections.

Here are some interesting facts detailed in the report:

• Open Collections has had over 1 million visitors in its first 12 months!
• The Digitization Centre has had partnerships with both the Department of Near Eastern and Classical Studies, as well as the CiTR Student Radio Society, to complete digitization projects.
• Staff at the digitization Centre have been working on a project to capture ephemeral online content related to B.C. and UBC through the web archiving tool, Archive-It.

One of the most favourited images on Flickr this past year!

To learn more about what we’ve been up to this past year, check out our Impact Report under “Reports” in our website’s Documentation section. And to learn more about how you can participate in Open Access Week 2016, click here.

The Berkeley Poster Collection, housed at the UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections, contains 250 posters created between 1968 to 1973 which document the advocacy and activism of student groups during the Vietnam War era. These posters attest to the tense political climate present in the United States and South East Asia during that time and the efforts of underground and guerilla groups to tap into the social conscience, pressing for greater awareness and public concern regarding the Vietnam War.

“Peace on Nixon”, 1973

“USA Stop Policing the World”, 1973 (with perforated edges of printer paper visible)

“America is a Democracy…”, 1973

At the Digitization Centre we frequently revisit and assess the quality of our digitized collections. As time passes our capacity to produce higher-quality digital images often improves due to newer equipment or scanning techniques. In the case of the Berkeley Poster Collection the images currently available through Open Collections were originally scanned in 2009. It is therefore not surprising that our facilities and equipment have changed so significantly that we’re now revisiting this collection to improve upon the current digital images we have!

A digitization student prepares posters for rescanning

Additionally, a large number of the posters were printed on discarded computer paper which was repurposed for the posters. A significant portion of these pages have computer code and data on the verso of the poster images – information which was not included in the original digital images but which has now been deemed important enough to include in this new round of scans. This type of “ephemera” not only offers insight into the type of work that early computers were doing at Berkeley in the sixties and seventies but also provides contextual information which situates this collection in a very specific time and location.

Verso of poster containing computer code

“America Saves the World”, 1973, ready to be rescanned

Sometimes it can be a challenge to assess all of the possible “values” that a historical item may have which is why it is so important to revisit and reassess digitized collections over time.

If you would like to browse the Berkeley Poster Collection, click here. To learn more about the equipment that we are using to rescan the posters check out this previous blog post on the topic!