Please note that Rare Books and Special Collections, the Chung Collection and University Archives will be closed on Good Friday and Easter Monday; however, we are open as usual on Saturday the 30th, from 12-5. Please check the Library’s Hours and Locations portal to see hours for other branches over Easter weekend.

Amongst our English literature collections at Rare Books and Special Collections is the Norman Colbeck Collection which includes more than 450 authors and over 13,000 volumes. In the collection are two copies of Christmas-Eve and Easter Day by Robert Browning:

Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day by Robert Browning

This work was the first Browning published after his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett. It was published by Chapman & Hall in 1850.

Title page, Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day

Easter-Day by Robert Browning

The two sections, Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day are often referred to as separate, but were published together in this one volume. To see what other works by Robert Browning, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, we have in RBSC, you can search the library catalogue. If you are interested in the Colbeck Collection, the catalogue A Bookman’s Catalogue is available both in print and online.

Due to a software upgrade to our Automated Storage and Retrieval System many of our archival collections and some of our book collections will be unavailable to request on March 25 and 26. We anticipate the system being fully functional again on March 27th March 28th at noon.

How do you know if an item is affected or not? If the catalogue record (like this one) gives the location as “RARE BOOKS & SPECIAL COLLECTIONS ASRS storage” it will not be available. If the catalogue record (like this one) gives the location as “RARE BOOKS & SPECIAL COLLECTIONS” it will be available.

Thank you for your patience during this time.

Happy holidays from Rare Books and Special Collections! A reminder of the holiday hours for Rare Books and Special Collections, the Chung Collection and UBC Archives:

- We are closed on Saturday December 22

- We are open on Monday December 24 until mid-afternoon

- We are closed between December 25 and Jan 1 inclusive

- We are open Jan. 2 – 4, but will not open on Jan. 5. Our normal Saturday hours (12-5) resume on Jan. 12.

Did you know that Rare Books and Special Collections has excellent English literature collections? This naturally includes Charles Dickens, including the first edition of A Christmas Carol:

Published  in 1843, our first edition has a very delicate binding- it was clearly well loved before coming to Rare Books for preservation! But it is still very usable and you are welcome to request to see it in our reading room.

The first edition contains the now-famous illustrations by John Leech (although I admit when I imagine A Christmas Carol in my mind, I picture Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit and Michael Caine as Scrooge!)

Enjoy the holiday season and we hope to see you here in the reading room in the new year!

Rare Books and Special Collections, University Archives and the Chung Collection will be closed for Remembrance Day on Monday November 12, as are all branches of UBC Library (the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre is open but library operations within the building will be closed).

In honour of Remembrance Day, we’d like to feature one of our collections of wartime ephemera:

Saskatchewan million dollar campaign, June 17, 1922, SPAM 461C

This poster is part of our SPAM (Special Collections Pamphlet collection) and has been digitized as part of the World War poster collection, which features 40 posters from World Wars I and II. To learn more about our ephemeral collections, please visit our Ephemera Research Guide.

UBC will be holding a Remembrance Day Ceremony on November 11 in the War Memorial Gym. Details are available on the UBC Ceremonies website.

A reminder that Rare Books and Special Collections, University Archives and the Chung Collection will be closed for Thanksgiving on Monday October 8, as are all branches of UBC Library (the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre will be open, but library operations will be closed).

Thanksgiving is a time to celebrate the harvest, so we think this farm photograph from the Chung Collection is appropriate to the season:

Farm home of F. Ray, CC-PH-05601

The photograph is part of an album taken by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company Department of Colonization ca 1920 in rural Alberta and Saskatchewan. The photograph has the following inscription:

“The home of F. Ray, a prosperous farmer in the North Battleford district. Mr. Ray began farming in this district in 1903 with only $45; he now has 1,300 acres of the “finest land that lays out of doors”, 75 horses, 240 head of cattle and a full line of machinery, which is all his. He threshed 17,000 bushels of grain this year. He says: “There is nothing to it; this is the only country for a man to get a start in if he is alive.” ”

Because the Chung Collection covers the operations of the CPR so well, and the CPR was heavily involved in colonizing farm land in Canada, it is a great resource for researching the history of agriculture in Canada. Try using the advanced search and trying keywords such as “farm,” “agriculture,” and “colonization.” You can narrow your search using the type of media, dates and more.

A reminder that Rare Books and Special Collections, University Archives and the Chung Collection will be closed on Monday September 3 for Labour Day, as will all branches of UBC Library (the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre building is open, but the library functions will be closed).

On the subject of Labour Day, you may be interested to know that labour unions and workers’ issues is a strength of the collections here at RBSC. We hold the archival collections of many labour unions from around the province of B.C., including many primary source industries (forestry and woodworking unions, mining, steelworkers, etc) as well as other industries such as public servants and the retail and service sectors. We also have the archival collections of many labour activists and political collections.

To get a broad overview of our labour collections, you can do an advanced search in the library catalogue: under “type,” choose “Archival/mixed collections” and use keywords such as “labour”, “union”, and/or keywords related to the industry that you are interested in researching. For online content you may also wish to search the UBC Digital Collections for keywords like “labour” or “union.”

Cesar Chavez and Donald MacDonald at a convention of the Canadian Labour Congress, 1974, Fisherman Publishing Society fonds

A reminder that Rare Books and Special Collections, University Archives and the Chung Collection will be closed on Monday August 6th for B.C. Day, along with all other branches of UBC Library.

If you will be spending your long weekend watching the Olympic games, you might be interested to know that Rare Books and Special Collection holds the archives of former Olympian Harold Wright. He represented Canada in the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles as a sprinter, reaching the semi-finals in the 100 and 200 m races. He went on to become the president of the Canadian Olympic Association, and would play a key role in bringing the summer Olympics to Montreal in 1976. Wright passed away in 1997, and was inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1987.  His archives contains a great deal of textual documents and ephemera related to sporting in B.C. and Canada, especially the Olympic games. There catalogue record for the collection is here; click on the inventory link for a detailed finding aid.

We’re very pleased to announce a recent addition (or accrual to use archival language) to the archives of Douglas Coupland (or the Douglas Coupland fonds, again to use the archival terminology). We have been very fortunate to continue our relationship with Doug Coupland since we first acquired his archives in 2008, but for the first time we have decided to shine a light on what happens to archival material between coming in the doors and being made available to users in the reading room.  We think it’s particularly interesting and exciting to do this with the Douglas Coupland fonds because of the wide range of documentation he creates.

We’re fortunate also to have three student archivists jointly handling this project over the summer: Dan Gillean, Laura Hebert and Sarah Hillier are all students from the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies. They will be writing posts on this blog every week or so to keep you updated on their progress. You can see all of our posts on this project by browsing for the Coupland tag on our blog.

Without further adieu, our student archivists:

“On Thursday, June 21st a large shipment of banker’s boxes and strangely shaped packages arrived at UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. The twenty-six pieces comprise the recent accrual to the already substantial Douglas Coupland fonds. Because of Coupland’s varied range of medium (and we mean varied – everything from large-scale sculptures to screenplays to clothing lines) the contents of these boxes present many unique questions from the archival perspective.

“So how to tackle such a diverse accumulation of content? We have been tasked with the arrangement and description of this material and hope to collaboratively produce a clear picture of Coupland’s creative process through our treatment of the accrual. A little about us…

“Dan Gillean - MAS/MLIS Student at SLAIS, entering 3rd year
I’ve been working as a Student Archival Assistant since September of 2011, processing a large accrual from the provincial New Democratic Party. I’m particularly interested in the arrangement challenges we will encounter with this project – for example, how will we know if that flattened box of macaroni was meant for a collage, used in one of the Canada photographs, or kept as a reference item for one of his many narrative projects? What if the answer is all three? More importantly, how can we best indicate these linkages and conjectures to our patrons at RBSC?

“Laura Hebert - MAS/MLIS Student at SLAIS, entering 3rd year
I began my work as a Student Archive Assistant at RBSC just over a year ago. In my time here I have worked on the processing of a number of fonds and collections, both of a personal and organizational nature. Of particular interest to me are the items in this accrual that are atypical in terms of what we see in Special Collections. What are the best ways to treat these items that are so far from the textual record and how can we effectively communicate their context?

“Sarah Hillier - MAS/MLIS Student at SLAIS, entering 3rd year
I started working at RBSC as a Student Archives Assistant about a year ago. Most recently I’ve worked on the arrangement and description of a new accrual to the Arsenal Pulp Press fonds.  Of interest to me regarding the Douglas Coupland fonds is tackling the challenges associated with the proper storage and preservation of non-traditional archival materials, i.e. a bejeweled hornet’s nest, a digital orca, and a styrofoam leg

Our student archivists: Sarah, Dan and Laura

“Influenced by Coupland’s own fondness for the blog format, we will chronicle our journey here. Follow our progress as we unpack the work of the prolific writer and artist.”

Accrual to the Douglas Coupland fonds, awaiting processing

A reminder that like all UBC Library branches, Rare Books and Special Collections, University Archives and the Chung Collection will be closed in lieu of Canada Day on Monday July 2. We will resume normal hours on Tuesday July 3.

Dominion Day Parade, BC 1600-1

The photograph above is attributed to Phillip Timms and probably was taken near the turn of the 20th century. According to the inscription, this photograph was taken at the Dominion Day Parade at the corner of Georgia and Burrard.  The parade float is likely a reference to the famous Vancouver City Hall tent, erected and photographed after the great fire of 1886 (see it at the City of Vancouver Archives here).

This photograph is from our B.C. Historical Photograph Collection. For more information on searching and using photographs, please see our Historical Photographs Research Guide. When searching for historic Canada Day celebrations, remember to also search for “Dominion Day-” the name of the holiday was not changed until 1982- see Canada Day Background from Canadian Heritage.