In 2002, Queen Elizabeth II became the second-longest reigning monarch in British history, celebrating 50 years on the British throne. Despite the deaths of her sister, Princess Margaret and her mother, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, in February and March of 2002 respectively, Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Phillip, undertook an international tour in which she “express[ed] her thanks to people, both personally and officially, for their support and loyalty over her reign.”

For more information on Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip’s tour, please refer to the official website of the British Monarchy, where the details of the 2002 tour are discussed.

As part of that tour, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip visited the University of British Columbia in October, 2002. They had visited Canada the campus three times before, in 1951, 1959 and 1983. To view digitized photographs of their previous visits, please take a look at the University Archives virtual display, Royal Visits to the UBC Campus

During her 2002 visit to UBC, the Queen unveiled a plaque commemorating her visit and celebrating the naming of a room on the fourth floor of the Irving K Barber Learning Centre, the Golden Jubilee Room.

This room is a very popular study space, with mountain and ocean views.

A reminder that Rare Books and Special Collections, University Archives and the Chung Collection will be closed on Good Friday (April 6) and Easter Monday (April 9). We are however open on Saturday April 7 from 12-5 as usual. For full details on RBSC hours, click here.

The broadside above is from a collection of 55 broadsides from the Kitamaat Mission from 1894-1902, recently added to the Chung Collection. These sheets were used for teaching purposes at Sunday morning services at the mission, and are printed in both the English and Haisla languages. Material published from mission presses are important resources for understanding the interactions between Christian missionaries and First Nations people, and also are used as a source for historical transliterations of First Nations languages.  For more resources similar to this one, try searching the library catalogue for “mission press,” or for the name of a specific mission.

Our next featured B.C. place based on the room names in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre is Qualicum Beach, sometimes called Qualicum for short.  Qualicum Beach is located outside of Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island. The town’s primary industry is tourism, and is also a popular retirement town. As of the 2011 census, it had a population of just over 8,600.

The resource we are featuring is the Noel Money fonds, an archival collection of three scrapbooks belonging to Noel Money who was the proprietor of the Qualicum Beach Hotel in ca. late 1910’s-40’s. Prior to arriving in B.C., Money served in the Boer War and the First World War. While living in the Qualicum area, Money pursued his hobbies of fishing and hunting, which is primarily what the scrapbooks document- in fact, the books are made of pre-printed pages designed for logging the number of fish, birds and deer hunted or caught day by day (this collection is not for the faint of heart- the logs show that Money was a very successful hunter and fisherman!)

Interspersed with the hunting and fishing logs are photographs from his wilderness trips, often documenting visitors and special occasions.

For those more interested in the operation of the Qualicum Beach Hotel, there are inserted in the books some photographs and pieces of ephemera related to the hotel, such as this photograph of the hotel’s golf course:

The Noel Money scrapbooks can be requested for use in Rare Books and Special Collections- the catalogue record is here.

In the Barber Centre, the Qualicum Reading Room is room 305, the large, open study space at the top of the main stairs on the third floor, just outside the Chapman Learning Commons. This is a very popular space for studying and is also where the Chapman Learning Commons-AMS tutoring takes place.