The UBC Undergraduate Prize in Library Research is a way to showcase students’ effective and innovative use of library services, information experts and resources provided by the UBC Library. Applications for these prizes also provide students with an opportunity to reflect on their information-seeking experience, showcase their research beyond the classroom, and promote scholarship excellence at the undergraduate level at the University of British Columbia.
The Prize was established by UBC Library to encourage more and deeper use of its resources and collections, to advance information literacy at UBC, and to promote academic excellence at UBC.
Project title:Accessing Empire: Puck Magazine and the Making of a ‘Benevolent’ Conquest of the Philippines
Q: Could you tell us a little bit about your project?
Originally submitted for a history majors seminar on histories of the U.S. Empire, my project examines the contributions of Puck (1876-1918), an American satirical magazine, in normalizing U.S. empire during the Philippine-American War (1898-1902). This seminar delved deep into “informal empire,” and I specifically wanted to explore and argue how the process of embedding imperial ideology into popular visual culture paved way for normalization. For me to convey how Puck was able to translate imperial thinking into a familiar, digestible, and culturally acceptable phenomenon, my research required heavy engagement with visual archives, interdisciplinary scholarship, and selective methodology. The UBC Library’s research guides, databases, and digital archival access were central for both, the content of my paper and the way I conceptualized the historical evidence.
Q: What does winning this prize mean to you?
I am incredibly grateful! I would love to thank Dr. Roosa and his classes that I have taken. With his guidance, I have been able to continue examining and analyzing “informal” modes of knowledge and systemic power structures, especially through images and materiality (my favourites!). As a someone who aims to prioritize “non-traditional” methods of record keeping and learning, winning this prize is incredibly validating to the ways that I – and many others – have been brought up and keep culture, histories, and day-to-day education alive.
I would also like to thank UBC Library for offering me this prize – knowing my research process, I spend a lot more time going through books, films, magazines and clicking through tabs to understand archival content than I do writing. Amidst all excitement from the digitized material and downloaded PDFs, I was also writing this project while traveling for my honours thesis research with a heavy schedule, so having access to the many resources (especially those of the Library of Congress) via the library had been crucial for its completion.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
For the immediate future, I am gearing up to begin writing my honours thesis in the fall once I complete my final co-op term in August. Although my thesis strays from the temporal and geographic scope of this project, it follows in its footsteps as I similarly look to understand and then reframe colonial representations of courtly women in early modern South Asia. Doing this project was a great way for me to remain connected to the nuances and layers within colonial publications and the roles their language, visual imagery, and dissemination played in exerting power.
Aside from that, I am also applying to graduate programs in the winter. Since my time here at UBC, I have been on research trips, volunteered at local archives, and now, through winning this prize, I have been able to locate a vocation toward archival institutions and libraries systems that I would like to pursue.
Q: Do you have a favourite research spot at UBC Library?
I’ve always had two that I particularly loved – the Education Library, and the Asian Library. I have spent a lot of early mornings at both throughout my undergraduate degree. You’re almost always able to get a spot! Seating aside though, I thoroughly enjoyed being at those two libraries since they had such a beautiful combination of nature and media that I could access not only to inspire my studies, but also to take a breather, relax, and reconnect with learning through a lens of enjoyment.
We are excited to announce that the UBC Digitization Centre has digitized the Italian-language book «Emigrante» which is now available in UBC Open Collections.
This pocket-sized book, written in Italian and Italian dialects, had a print run of just 300 copies in 1985. Today, only a few known copies remain, including those held by The Italian Cultural Centre Library and the Vancouver Public Library. Some copies may also exist in private homes, kept by the families of those who shared their stories. Most of the original books were destroyed during a basement flood in the late 1980s, making the surviving copies all the more valuable. The Digitization Centre has made this book available as an important educational resource for historical research, giving voice to a past generation of Italian immigrants in Canada.
«Emigrante» is a collection of oral histories and traditional recipes from the home written by Italian immigrants in Vancouver and across British Columbia. It captures the challenges faced by early immigrants in pre-multicultural Canada, while also highlighting their resilience, determination and hope. These firsthand narratives, spanning from the late 1940s to the early 1980s, provide unique insights into working conditions, social interactions and family relationships within Vancouver’s Italian community. They also offer a snapshot of pioneer life in the interior of BC and touch on significant historical events, such as the displacement of Cominco smelter workers and the Renata inhabitants in the Kootenays.
See below for a selection of photos from the book.
June 1985 : a large group of members of the “Senior Citizens Association – Club Over 50” on a social outing to Peach Arch Park, White Rock, B.C.
Top photo: Gabriele Iacobucci, his wife Rosina, and their son Danny (1931). Bottom photo: Gabriele and Rosina Iacobucci with their children Danny and Tricia (1934).
Top photo: Leonardo and Angela Maria Bellusci on the terrace of their home. Bottom photo: Squamish, 1954. Linda De Paoli D’Odorico and her friend Rita Bortolossi.
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are freely available for others to use, adapt, and share. UBC has an ongoing commitment to OER as a way to reduce student costs and expand equitable access to course materials. This work is supported through initiatives such as OER Fund grants, collaborative support from the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT) and UBC Library, and recognition of open education contributions within the university’s teaching and promotion practices. If you are new to OER, Open UBC is a great starting point for exploring how OER are created and used at UBC.
Access and Preservation
A growing number of OER are available in cIRcle, which provides stable, long-term access to educational resources created at UBC. While cIRcle is not recommended for ongoing edits or interactive content, it offers a reliable “version of record” for OER. This makes it a useful complement to platforms such as Pressbooks, where resources may continue to be updated, by ensuring a preserved and citable version is available over time.
To further support discovery, a team at the Library has been working to enhance how OER in cIRcle are described. This work began as a pilot in 2024 and is now being integrated into ongoing operations. As part of this initiative, you may notice a brief “OER Description” added to the metadata of some records. These structured descriptions highlight key details such as resource type, subject area, and intended audience, helping instructors more effectively identify materials that match their course level and teaching needs. This additional context helps address some of the limitations of repository-based access by making materials easier to find and assess for reuse.
Getting Started
Explore recent additions to the UBC OER Series in cIRcle.
Are you a UBC faculty member who has developed an OER, and are interested in depositing a version to cIRcle?Review our Faculty and Staff Work page, where you can use the cIRcle Item Submission Form to get started with your submission.
Interested in integrating OER into your teaching or starting your own project? Explore Open UBC or reach out to the team at open.ubc@ubc.ca for a consultation.
LAW LIBRARY level 3: KF250 .C36 2024
C.L. Campbell & O.R. Duhart, Persuasive Legal Writing: A Storytelling Approach, 2nd ed (Aspen Publishing, 2024).
LAW LIBRARY level 3: KF250 .R425 2025
J. Regalia, Level Up Your Legal Writing: Techniques and Technology to Supercharge Your Skills (Aspen Publishing, 2025).
LAW LIBRARY level 3: KF2980 .M52 2026
A.R. Miller, M.H. Davis & D. Neacsu, Intellectual Property, Patents, Trademarks, and Copyright in a Nutshell, 8th ed (West Academic, 2026).
Effective today, the UBC Library Ask Us website provides students, staff, faculty, alumni and guests with FAQs and a new form to report online access issues and engage with our team.
Library employees are encouraged to report online access issues through the Library Employee Help Desk, CS: Issues and Maintenance form.
This week in advance of National AccessAbility Week 2026, we are taking a dive into Open Collections to trace the history of the Crane Memorial Library, UBC’s library for the blind and partially sighted – and the remarkable people who made it happen.
This post is part of a short blog series inspired by National AccessAbility Week 2026, which seeks to raise awareness around the importance of accessibility in Canada, and National Deafblind Awareness month which seeks to draw attention to deafblindness this June.
Content Warning: This blog post features items that may contain outdated, ableist, and derogatory language about blind, deaf and disabled people.
The story of the Crane Library at UBC started way back in the 1930s with one man, Charles “Charlie” Allan Crane (1906-1965) who attended UBC between 1931 and 1933.
Charlie Crane was the first deafblind person in Canada to attend university when there were few accommodations for disabled students. His time at UBC was brief, but when he died in 1965, he donated the largest known private collection of Braille texts in the world (numbering around 6,000 volumes), to the University of British Columbia.
Crane Memorial Library
In 1967, after receiving the contents of Charles’s private collection UBC announced plans for the new Charles A. Crane Memorial Library in Brock Hall. Open Collections has multiple photos of the Opening Ceremony and commemorative plaque installed in 1968.
The library officially opened on April 4, 1968 on the first floor of Brock Hall after receiving funding from the CNIB and the UBC Woodward Foundation. A generous donation of $4,700 from the Delta Gamma sorority was used to create a small reading room.
Paul and Judy
Two key figures that pop up a lot in the Crane Library are Paul and Judy Thiele. Paul was a partially sighted MA student who became the head of the Crane Memorial Library in 1968, and went on to teach at UBC for 35 years before retiring in 2001. In 2021, Paul was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by UBC for his pioneering work at the Crane Library before he passed away in 2023.
Judith Thiele was the first blind person to graduate with a library degree in Canada. During her career, she was one of the few professional librarians in Canada who was an expert in Braille and alternative formats. She worked for the library for over 20 years, serving as the Reference Librarian for the collection until her death in 1993.
The UBC Archives Photo Collection and UBC Publications collection include multiple interesting snapshots of the Crane Library during its peak operations in the 70s and 80s.
Classified ads from the Crane Library often appeared in the pages of The Ubyssey recruiting students for their volunteer reader program, which paired blind students with sighted volunteers who could read regular library books and course materials to them if a Braille version or audio recording wasn’t available.
In the early 1970s, the Crane Library received multiple grants to begin a “talking book” recording program. They initially aimed to record 400-500 talking books a year, but production rapidly expanded throughout the 1970s and 80s becoming one of the library’s core services.
While the materials in the library were primarily intended to serve UBC’s blind students, they were also available to students with learning or other print disabilities.
Photos from the 1980s show the library’s extensive bookshelves, recording studio, and recording booths. Audio recording continued at the library into the 2010s and over time the library transitioned from tape reels to cassettes to CDs and eventually, digital audio.
In 1995, the Crane Library was renamed to the Crane Resource Centre, and made a division of what was then called the Disability Resource Centre (DRC), now known as the UBC Centre for Accessibility.
Even after this, small glimpses of Crane Library continue to pop up in Open Collections throughout the 90s and 2000s, showing how the library’s services changed after the digital millennium.
The Crane Library is a testament to the impact and importance of accessibility at UBC and beyond. However, as we are reminded every National Accessibility Week, the work of accessibility is never truly done and we all have a role in maintaining accessibility for generations to come.
We hope you enjoyed this blog post! There is plenty more to be found on Open Collections about the Crane Library and we hope this post illuminated this underrecognized piece of UBC history for you!
For those interested in finding more, the following Open Collections Searches are useful when researching the Crane Library:
Hello everyone, I’m Vanessa, the new Digital Repository Research Assistant at cIRcle for the Summer 2026 term. As a second year student in the UBC iSchool’s Master of Library and Information Studies program (MLIS), my main interest is working with digital repositories to support research transparency, replication, discovery, and preservation. I’m very happy to be a part of the cIRcle team, and super excited to nurture and engage my current knowledge.
My work this summer will include assisting with the deposit of digital content, updating cIRcle procedures and participating in user testing as cIRcle prepares to upgrade its version of DSpace, reviewing and enhancing metadata for existing items, and of course, contributing to cIRcle’s blog! Please look forward to hearing from me again in the coming weeks!
Portrait of Yip Sang, the “unofficial mayor” of Chinatown, 1920s, Chung Collection, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0355154
Norman Kwong, ca. 1955, Chinese Canadian Stories Collection, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0367697
Family photograph taken at Greenwood, B.C., 1942, Japanese Canadian Photo Collection, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0049116
In honour of Asian Heritage Month, we are rounding up some of our best collections that tell the stories of Asian Canadians in Canada and beyond. Over the years Open Collections has digitized multiple collections that deserve to be highlighted and information on these collections is scattered across our Digitizer’s Blog. Hopefully, this post can be a guide for anyone hoping to navigate these collections and find new stories.
For more information on all our Asian Studies related holdings this previous blog post is an excellent place to start! We’ve also included links to older blog posts about some of these collections. Hopefully one or more of these collections sparks your interest this Asian Heritage Month!
Photograph of Rhoda Chow (又名 Rose Lee) 站在丈夫 Chiang Kai Lee (又名 Sing Lee) 手抱女兒, and baby Lillian Lee 的合照, August 10, 1928, Kamloops Cultural Association subcollection, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0367586
Letter to Ma Jiexiu from his uncle], Letter addressed to the writer’s nephew regarding the purchase of land, 1930, Wah Shun Company sub-collection, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0367733
The Chinese Canadian Stories collection gathers items from UBC Library, SFU Library, City of Vancouver Archives, Community Historical Recognition Program (CHRP) community partners, and other community contributors.
The collection currently has 10 sub-collections each focusing on different snapshots of Chinese Canadian History.
Chinese Canadian Military Museum Society – Photos, records and other materials related to Chinese Canadian military families and service members from 1924-2011.
Louie Papers – A collection of WWI records from the Louie Family dated 1918-1929.
Chock On Fong Fonds – Records relating to the Wo Chock On Fong Association of Vancouver, a local labour and community centre that operated from the 1910 to the 1980s
Henry Lock-tin Lee Collection – A collection of journals, portraits and other materials from Henry Lock-tin Lee, who was a member of the Kuomintang (KMT), or Chinese Nationalist Party, and a traditional Chinese medicine doctor. Includes materials from 1916-1970.
Kamloops Chinese Cultural Association– A 60 item collection based on the histories of five Kamloops and British Columbia families: Dang, Kong, Lee, Lim, and Marr between 1912 and 2012.
Norman Kwong Collection – A collection focused on the life and work of Norman ‘Normie’ Kwong, a Chinese Canadian Hall of Fame athlete, sports executive, and Lieutenant Governor of Canada between 1948 and 1985.
Ron Bick Lee Fonds – The family records of the Lee family, including those of Ron Bick Lee and Foo Hung Co from 1959 to 1993.
Wah Shun CompanyFonds – A collection of records created or received by the Wah Shun Company of Vancouver from 1919-1938.
Some previous blog posts which might be interesting or helpful when navigating this collection include:
A selection of some more items from the collection:
李樂天和孟義的照片 = Portrait of Lock Tin Lee and Meng Yi]; [李樂天和孟義的照片], October 1952, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0367628
Photograph of Ron Bick Lee and his wife Zhen Qiongchun; 李日如與甄瓊春合影, taken at Wand Studio. [Date Unknown], Bick Lee sub-collection, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0367055
“A New Zealand Corporal whom I spent part of my leave with. On bridge over Forth Edinburgh” from the Louie Papers, ca. 1920s, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0367674
This part of the collection has been digitized for broader use and contains images of Japanese Canadians from the 1880s to 1985. It contains images of countless named and unnamed Japanese families, photos of the 1907 Vancouver race riot, and an extensive collection of photos showing Japanese internment camps, language schools, ghost towns, and current and former communities.
Bride (Nagami) and groom (Umeza) at Tashme Japanese Internment Camp, ca. 1940s, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0049221
Photograph of a Kendo tournament taken in Vancouver, BC, 1972, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0049028
Building damaged during Vancouver riot of 1907 – 431 Powell Street, 1907, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0048847
Some previous blog posts which might be interesting or helpful when navigating this collection include:
The Punjabi Patrika, published in Abbotsford, BC, is one of only two bilingual Punjabi/English newspapers published in Canada and offers a unique lens into BC’s South Asian community.
An archive of the Patrika was donated to The Reach in Abbotsford by owners/publishers Andy and Pritam Sidhu. The Reach oversaw the digitization of the hard copy archives of the Punjabi Patrika from its beginning in October 1996 to 2014, and are hosted here on Open Collections. In combination with the Patrika’s currently published e-editions, there is now a fully digital and accessible archive of this paper available to the public.
Some interesting and potentially helpful blog-posts on this collection include:
Page 1 of the Tairiku Nippō 大陸日報 (Continental Daily News), December 6, 1941, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0109441
This collection contains over 10,000 issues of the Pre-WWII Japanese-Canadian newspaper Tairiku Nippō (Continental Daily News), which was published in Vancouver between 1907 and 1941. The paper, predominantly written in Japanese, was an important source of information for Japanese immigrants to British Columbia.
It is an excellent source of information for those interested in learning more about Japanese Canadian communities in BC prior to WWII.
Assistant Professor of Teaching Ayaka Yoshimizu, as part of her “Sex and Migration in the Transpacific Underground” website, has made a series of translations of the newspaper entitled “Exploration of Devil Caves | 魔窟探検記.” These translations contain detailed stories of Japanese migrants operating and working at brothels at the turn of the 20th century in Canada.
Some interesting and potentially helpful blog-posts on this collection include:
The Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection is a collection of over 10,000 digitized archival documents, photographs, books and artifacts related to three broad themes: British Columbia History, Immigration and Settlement and the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. Donated in 1999 by Drs. Wallace and Madeline Chung, the Chung Collection is currently held at UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections.
The collection includes include extensive materials related to immigrants, and a particularly strong emphasis on Chinese Canadian communities and the Canadian Pacific Railway. There are currently over 1,350 digitized items related to Asian experiences in North America that span from 1864 to 1989.
Painting on foil, found in a Chinese Mother Goose rhymes book, May 14, 2026, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0366533
Wooden opium trade chest, containing opium layout, ca. 1900, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0355008
Many of the items in the collection are physical artifacts, many of which are on display in the Chung | Lind Gallery at the Vancouver Campus of the University of British Columbia.
Graduation portrait of Dr. Victoria Cheung, the first woman to graduate from the University of Toronto Department of Medicine, 1922, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0218234
Portrait of a Chinese Family, 1920s, Chung Collection, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0217128
Photo of the Vernon Armstrong Chinese Nationalist League, 1913, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0355161
Due to the vastness of the collection, we recommend you try the following advanced subject term searches when searching for materials related to Asian History:
A digitized collection of over 630+ records from the City of Vancouver archives from the “unofficial mayor” of Chinatown dated between 1901 and 1919.
Yip Sang (1881-1927) was a businessman, political activist and social reformer who was one of the driving forces in the establishment of the Chinese Benevolent Association, the Chinese School and the Chinese Hospital (now Mount St. Joseph’s) in Vancouver.
Portrait of Yip Sang, 1920s, from the Chung Collection, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0355154
[Letter, Wu Xin Chang to father Wu Weng Ze, informed that everyone in the family was fine and $10 was received, 1903], https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0114004
The digital Yip Sang Collection includes hundreds of personal and business related letters, account books and ephemera related to Yip Sang’s family and commercial pursuits and the rest of the collection is held in the City of Vancouver Archives.
Some interesting and potentially helpful blog-posts on this collection include:
