Enjoy the beautiful summer weather with a cool dessert and a good book! Our librarians, staff and student employees have selected some of their favourite reads, all available to borrow from the Asian Library. We hope these recommendations help you find your next great summer read.
Today we’ve put together a selection of example sources from the collection for historical crime researchers as well as some advice on where to look and how to search for items related to this topic in our collections.
Disclaimer:Many of the sources featured in this post present racist and outdated attitudes towards crime, mental health, immigrants and Indigenous peoples. While these historical materials remain relevant to researchers, they often contain significant bias, exaggeration, and colonial attitudes that sometimes more accurately reflect public attitudes towards crime than the crimes themselves.
BC Historical Books, and BC Historical Document Collections, 1849-1950
Noteworthy historical books include Magic, murder and mystery (1966) by B. A. McKelvie which highlights interesting historical crimes from across Canada. Including the strange saga of Brother XII, a mystic cult leader who established a colony on D’Arcy island near Nanaimo in the 1920s and 30s.
Index of Magic, murder and mystery (1966) by McKelvie, B. A. (Bruce Alistair), 1889-1960 (Click to Zoom)
Items in these collections range from informal, such as this document authored by John F. Smith, a retired Indian Agent from Kamloops, BC, that recollects multiple memorable cases that took place between 1873 and 1919, or highly official, like this copy of a court document from an 1880 Supreme Court murder case.
Phil Lind Collection: Gold Rush Era Crime, 1850s-1900s
The Gold Rush era of BC was incredibly tumultuous and had a reputation for bringing violence, crime and disorder to boom towns and frontier communities throughout BC, California, Alaska and the Yukon.
A 17 page summary of multiple famous gold rush era murders written by Henry J. Woodside.
A pamphlet on the life and crimes of slippery Klondike Era con-man “Soapy Smith”, ca. 1890s-1900s,
Chung Collection
The Chung Collection includes pamphlets, periodicals and a variety of diverse objects that report on or discuss crime, especially high profile crimes that involved local Chinese Canadians such as the Lim Jim (Gim Lee Yuen) Opium smuggling case that occurred in Vancouver in 1927.
Page from the Wireless Press from the Metagama Steamship, 8-9 Sept. and 23-24 Jun. 1924, on crimes committed in Europe and other overseas locales.
The BC Historical Newspaper Collection is one of the best sources for historical crime topics, and can often be done relatively easily using basic keyword searching. Local newspapers in BC often reported weekly or periodically on local court proceedings and cases alongside larger national or international cases.
For example, instead of “jail” an older document might use “gaol”. instead of searching for “court proceedings” many smaller papers title these sections “assizes”. The assize system is a travelling court system that was historically very common across BC, and is still used today in small communities.
News articles of this type can be incredibly fascinating because they highlight local incidents ranging from petty land disputes to incredibly serious violent crimes.
Article from The Atlin Claim, June 23, 1906. There is an article about a much more serious crime elsewhere on this page, but I’m quite curious about Henry Garneau being charged with “Unlawfully opening a Postal Letter”
For those interested or willing to delve into legal records and legislation, Open Collections has two collections specially suited to those purposes.
BC Sessional Papers: Legislative Reports and Records, 1876-1983
The BC Sessional Papers is a collection of selected papers tabled in the Legislative Council of British Columbia from between 1865 and 1982, and includes 1700+ legislative documents on prisons, policing and crime that provide a glimpse into how the courts functioned in this period, the early state of the BC prison system, and the issues affecting prisons and prisoners.
John Keenlyside Legal Research Collection, Court and Legal Records, 1876-1983
The John Keenlyside Legal Research Collection includes 300+ documents related to criminal and other court proceedings during the BC colonial period (pre-1871). Some of the documents include information on the historical British Columbia Provincial Police force and various Japanese-Canadian and civil rights groups.
Conclusion
These are far from all of the collections that you can use to search for sources on historical crimes, but hopefully this post got you started on your historical crime research project!
When you think about how AI and technology might change our world, do you feel excited and optimistic, or confused, anxious, and perhaps even afraid? Either way, you are not alone. The Asian Library’s new display, The Shape of Tomorrow: Envisioning Futures with AI and Beyond, explores how people imagine the world ahead. Through science fiction, scholarly works, […]
LAW LIBRARY level 3: KE3500 .F59 2026
A. Flynn & J. Hermer, The Bylaw State: Encampment Evictions and the Struggle for Public Space (Fernwood Publishing, 2026).
A new work has been added to cIRcle: Academic Podcasting: A Handbook for Knowledge Exchange. This handbook discusses podcasts as an effective way of making academic research results sharable, digestible, and accessible. It shares tips and tricks for individuals in the scholarly community who want to create their own podcast to support knowledge exchange and mobilization for audiences beyond academia. The handbook also includes podcast creation considerations such as audience, format, branding, production, editing, and publishing.
This work is a part of The Knowledge Exchange: A Partnership in-Action Podcast, hosted by Dr. Barbara Lee and a team of UBC graduate students. This podcast includes the collaborative work between social work scholars and community partners. Each episode features their contributions to community engagement and the knowledge exchange and mobilization initiative.
cIRcle’s Support of Alternative Research Outputs
cIRcle currently holds nearly 150 podcasts, created by UBC faculty, students, and community partners. Beyond podcasts, cIRcle supports and makes available a wide range of alternative research outputs, such as audio-, visual-, and video-based outputs. You can read more about depositing and searching for alternative outputs in our blog post: Alternative Research Outputs in cIRcle.
Deposit Your Research
If you’re a UBC faculty member, researcher, student, or staff and interested in contributing your textual and non-textual work to cIRcle, please review our Submissions page for more information or Contact us.
This month, UBC Library is launching a $200,000 campaign to raise funds in support of ongoing programming at the Chung | Lind Gallery. Donations up to $120,000 will be matched by a generous pledge from the Jack and Sylvia Gin Foundation, dollar for dollar, to establish a paid internship that will hire its first candidate in 2027–2028.
The Chung | Lind Gallery showcases the Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection and Phil Lind Klondike Gold Rush Collection. The exhibition space, located in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre on UBC Vancouver campus, brings together two library collections of rare and culturally significant materials from Canada’s history.
The two complementary collections explore the economic and social growth of early British Columbia and the Yukon through exhibits that reveal stories about the Indigenous experience and the experience of Chinese immigrants to BC. The gallery provides students, faculty and the public with direct access to two significant Canadian cultural properties.
As the Gallery’s role as a teaching, research, and community-engaged space continues to expand, the additional capacity created by a paid internship position will support expanded programming and community engagement related to the collections.
Please consider contributing to this campaign to see your donation matched. We invite you to join us in helping to maximize the impact of this role on the Chung | Lind Gallery.
To donate or make your pledge, contact Elaine Fung, Senior Director, Development and Alumni Engagement at 604-822-3756, or elaine.fung@ubc.ca.
LAW LIBRARY level 3: KZ4078 .D468 2025
E. Denza, Diplomatic Law: Commentary on the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, 5th ed (Oxford University Press, 2025).
Love letters, coded postcards, photographs, glass lantern slides, Womyn’s Centre t-shirts, college photos from Iowa, dance cards and more. These are just some of the deeply personal records found in the Lesbian Collection at UBC Library Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC), a new archival resource that captures nearly three centuries of queer history, from 1725 to 2012.
The archive preserves the stories of hundreds of lives lived in secret, on stage, with family and in communities living in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and France. It brings together personal correspondence, photographs, ephemera and other records that offer rare insight into the everyday experiences of lesbian, queer and gender-diverse people.
Photographs from the Lesbian Collection at RBSC.
As noted in the collection’s finding guide, available online, the Lesbian Collection includes materials from across LGBTQIA+ history and culture, relating to lesbian women, , drag kings and queens, activists, reformers and others we might today understand as having lived queer lives. These records document the many ways people have expressed their identities across time
“The collection takes an expansive view of gender and sexuality, pulling together materials that resonate with queer experiences, aesthetics and identities through the ages,” notes Amelia D., Archives and Reference Assistant at RBSC, who worked extensively to catalogue the collection. “All too frequently relegated to the margins of history and archives, love between women takes centre stage in the Lesbian Collection.”
Photograph from theLesbian Collection at RBSC depicting two women, with a French inscription that reads: “Nous nous aimerons…..” (“We love each other.”)
Several prominent historical figures are represented in the archive, including American political figure and activist Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), American novelist and poet Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), American stage actor Charlotte Cushman (1816-1876), and Canadian teacher and poet Deborah Cottman (1728-1806). However, many researchers and scholars will find the greatest value contained within the records of everyday life, which document the experiences, relationships and communities of queer women.
“We have a responsibility to see everyone represented in our archival collections,” says Krisztina Laszlo, Archivist at RBSC, noting that until now, most of the queer-related materials in the library’s current holdings focus on the lives of men. “We owe it to the university and community to make everyone feel supported and represented. The Lesbian Collection fills so many gaps in our holdings.”
This week we are taking a dive into Open Collections to highlight more tips and tricks for doing research in UBC Open Collections.
This blog post covers some more advanced search techniques, so if you have not already, we strongly recommend you check out our previous blog posts on how to search Open Collections.
Content Warning: This blog post features items that may contain outdated, ableist, and derogatory language about blind, deaf and disabled people.
Those who read our previous blog posts on the Crane Library at UBC will know that Charles Allan Crane (1906-1965) was a student who attended UBC between 1931 and 1933, and made history as the first deafblind person to attend a Canadian university. Since we are coming up on the 2026 International Day of Deafblindness on June 27th, this seems like a fitting test case!
Person or Organization Metadata
For many items in Open Collections, especially images, there is a field called Person or Corporation where the names of significant people or organizations are listed.
For example this image of Charlie with Alexander Graham Bell includes the linked name: “Crane, Charles”
When we click on it, the link brings up everything else Open Collections tied to the same person or organization.
In this case only two images pop up.
This means we need to dig further and find some written sources.
Regular Search
If we do a regular search on Charlie using two variations of his name we find a lot of potential sources. A lot of this might be relevant but this is too many results to sort through! This is a common issue when researching people with generic first or last names.
So, let’s see if we can do a more precise search to find out what Charlie was up to while in Vancouver.
Advanced Full Text Searching
This is where background research becomes very important. Some pieces of info that are good to have before searching for a more obscure person are the basic facts of their life including name variations, where they lived and when they were born and died. For Charlie we know the following from biographies written about him.
Name(s): Charles Allan Crane (1605-1965)
Alternative Names: Often goes by “Charlie” or “Charlie Crane” with or without middle name Allan or Allen (if misprinted). Sometimes shortens Charles to “Ches.” when publishing journalistic articles
Place: Born in Ontario, lived in Nova Scotia, moved to BC in 1922 (17 years old). Attended UBC between 1931 and 1933, and spent the rest of his life in Vancouver. Contributed to the UBC student newspaper The Ubyssey
To do an advanced search on Charlie we would take the following steps:
You’ll notice that below the search there are some details of how the search syntax works to make searching more efficient, but we won’t be trying all of this in this blog post.
Build Your Search
For our search we will be searching variations of Charlie Crane’s name with an asterisk (*) where his middle name would be. In Open Collections this works as what is called a wildcard operator.
If we wanted to expand the search more we could select “Any of these words” or “All of these words” instead of “exact phrase”. But in this case we want only people with the first name Charles followed by the last name Crane.
Every time we add a new phrase to our search we also make sure “OR” is between them.
AND vs. OR
It’s important to make sure you choose the right option when picking between AND and OR. AND will give you a much smaller amount of results but can exclude too much, and OR will cast a wider net.
Under Limits I’ve chosen to limit the search to our digitized historical collections and limit the date to the years Charlie lived in British Columbia, 1922-1965. We can apply more filters later if needed
Search
Let’s hit search and see what we have!
After that we have a small collection of 13 results to sort through. We might have found the same items with a simpler search as well, but it was worth narrowing the results down.
Even with this narrower search, some of the results are about different people also named Charlie Crane. But when we click into some of the items we find some interesting things like this 1929 Legislative Report that cites his academic achievements at the BC School for the Deaf and Blind.
An article from the Ubyssey introducing him to his classmates.
If we wanted to find more on Charlie from here we could expand the search criteria to include a broader set of dates from his birth in 1905 to 2026 to find materials published about him after his death, or expand our search in new directions.
Conclusion
We hope this blog post was informative and we encourage you to try doing some searching yourself using some of these strategies for your own research. Let us know if you have any questions about advanced search that we can answer in future blog posts!
Carbin, C. F., & Smith, D. L. (1996). Deaf heritage in Canada: A distinctive, diverse, and enduring culture. McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Available for free courtesy of The Canadian Cultural Society for the Deaf.
