Recently the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office released its 2024/2025 Impact and Activity Report, showcasing some of the year’s highlights and accomplishments.
For more information, or to share feedback please contact scholarly.communications@ubc.ca
Photo courtesy Paul Joseph / UBC Brand & Marketing / UBC Studios.
The cIRcle team is happy to announce the release of our 2024-2025 Impact and Activity Report! Read on to learn more about some of our achievements and projects from the past year.
cIRcle’s collection now holds over 86,000 items from UBC’s global community, with more than 3,500 items deposited in the last year. Students continue to be our biggest contributing group – since 2022-2023, undergraduate submissions to cIRcle have increased by 75%.
Each year as we develop new and continuing partnerships with the UBC community, we celebrate the addition of unique material such as the Kaska Language Learning Resources, including flashcards, audio recordings, and instructional materials from the Kaska Cards App and the Kaska Language Website.
cIRcle continues to support the open access sharing and preservation of research materials created by UBC faculty, students, and our larger community of scholarship. Our collection of alternative research outputs grew this year with the addition of the
As we continue preparations for migration to , the open repository software used by thousands of academic institutions, our team has continued to improve the discovery & use of cIRcle’s collections.
The Theses and Dissertations in cIRcle : Discovery and Use guide offers some tips & tricks on how to successfully search for theses in cIRcle. Beyond cIRcle, more than 56,000 of UBC’s theses and dissertations can now be found via Library & Archives Canada’s Theses Canada portal, which brings together theses and dissertations from universities across the country.
Our cIRcle Blog regularly highlights new items, events, and projects going on at cIRcle and across the UBC community. Read about self-archiving policies, the Paper Pledge for the Planet, and more!
In our previous blog post, we introduced the remarkable Yucho Chow, a 20th-century Vancouver photographer who pushed back against the discriminatory racial practices of the era by welcoming anyone—regardless of race or nationality—into his studio.
The Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection and the Uno Langmann Family Collection of B.C. Photographs, both available to browse through UBC Open Collections, feature an array of Yucho Chow’s work, including a remarkable album containing studio portraits and ephemera from his business operations.
Advertisement on studio envelope, 1930s (Uno Langmann Collection)
This week, we delve deeper into Chow’s works, examining his photographic style and techniques. We also look at Chow’s legacy, including his lasting impact on marginalized communities in Vancouver, and the amazing project that once again brought his photographs to light.
Photographic style
In alignment with the progressive nature of his business practices, Chow also took a modern and resourceful approach to his craft. He employed creative photo editing skills to “reunite” families through images, collaging family members into the photographs that they could not be physically present for. This was especially important during the 24 years that Canada’s Chinese Immigration Act kept families apart.
Portrait of family with collage, circa 1930s (Uno Langmann Collection)
Another enticing element of Chow’s service was his commitment to high-quality props and backdrops. After his studio was damaged by a fire in 1935, he replaced his previous backdrop—one that expressed “European opulence”—with an Art Deco-themed set, which can be spotted in many of his surviving portraits today.
Group portrait in front of Art Deco backdrop, circa 1930s (Uno Langmann Collection)
As the studio was open 24 hours a day, Chow relied heavily on his family’s help. His eldest daughter, Mabel, played a critical role in the studio’s operations, assisting her father in setting up equipment and developing film. His daughter Jessie used oil paints to provide the studio’s colour services, initially filling in minor details, but eventually moving on to colouring entire photographs.
Hand-painted family wedding portrait, circa 1930s (Uno Langmann Collection)
Legacy
Yucho Chow extensively documented Vancouver’s South Asian community, both in his studio and at cultural events. As cultural researcher Naveen Girn states, without him, there would be “almost no photographs of the early [Vancouver] South Asian community”. Select photos are available to browse through the South Asian Canadian Digital Archive.
In 2024, well-known Vancouver graffiti artist Smokey D. memorialized Chow in a massive mural in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, depicting him with a camera alongside the phrase “Welcome to Chinatown”.
The Yucho Chow Project
After Chow’s death in 1949, his sons Philip and Peter continued to run the studio. When they decided to close its doors in 1986, they were faced with a dilemma of what to do with the studio’s massive collection of prints and negatives. Unaware of the full magnitude of their father’s impact, they opted to dispose of the five truckloads worth of materials. While an unfortunate loss, this did not stop Catherine Clement from embarking on the task of tracking down Chow’s works in 2011, unearthing photos from family photo albums, institutional archives, personal collections, and even eBay.
Members of the Chinese student concert in aid of the U.B.C. Stadium Fund, 1931 (Chung Collection)
In 2019, Clement and her team mounted select materials from their 200-photograph collection in an exhibition at the Chinese Cultural Centre, which led to another 300 images being shared with the project. In 2020, they published an award-winning coffee table book entitled “Chinatown Through a Wide Lens: The Hidden Photographs of Yucho Chow.” Upon completion of their incredible project in 2021, Clement and her team donated the collection, which by this time encompassed approximately 600 photos, to the City of Vancouver Archives.
Reclaiming histories
The influence of immigrant communities on Vancouver’s cultural identity has often been obscured through their omission from the city’s historical visual materials. Though much of Chow’s prolific body of work has been lost over time, his surviving images reflect the enduring presence of these communities, countering Canada’s many whitewashed, colonial historical narratives.
Portrait of public servant and community leader Won Alexander Cumyow, circa 1910 (Chung Collection)
Yucho Chow’s work certainly illuminates his own history, including his values, family life, and immigrant experience. But, as Clement states, it also illuminates the histories of the many other “ordinary and everyday people who existed here, who made a contribution here, and were brave enough to come”.
Yucho Chow and family at their residence, between 1900 and 1930 (Uno Langmann Collection)
Learn more
How to Identify a Yucho Chow (Yucho Chow Project)
Yucho Chow Photo Studio (permanent exhibit, Chinatown Storytelling Centre)
References
Cheung, C. (2020, December 29). How Yucho Chow’s photos reframed Vancouver history. The Tyee. https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2020/12/29/Yucho-Chow-Photos-Reframe-Vancouver/
Chinatown through a wide lens: The hidden photographs of Yucho Chow. (n.d.). Yucho Chow. https://www.yuchochow.ca/
Griffin, K. (2019, May 3). ‘Silent’ Yucho Chow photograph has a story again after being identified by family. Vancouver Sun. https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/silent-yucho-chow-photograph-has-a-story-again-after-being-identified-by-family
Peng, J. (2023). Yucho Chow. In The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/yucho-chow
Yucho Chow. (2025 August 5). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucho_Chow
Photo used with permission of the Mine Water Solutions Conference.
The fifth Mine Water Solutions (MWS) Conference was held at UBC Vancouver from June 16-18, 2025. Co-organized by the Bradshaw Research Initiative for Minerals and Mining (BRIMM) and C3 Alliance, this international technical conference brings together experts in the field of mining and water management to share research and best practices.
cIRcle is pleased to offer permanent, open access to a selection of papers from this year’s conference via the International Conference on Mine Water Solutions (5th : 2025) collection. The wide range of topics include: climate risk and resilience; closure water management; mine planning; mine water characterization; mitigation techniques; monitoring, modelling, and prediction; proactive mine water management; and watershed stewardship.
A few highlights include:
Over its history, the MWS Conference has been held every 2-4 years. Moving forward, the organizers plan to hold the conference every two years, and cIRcle looks forward to continued collaboration with the conference organizers to provide long-term access and preservation to these valuable research materials.
Hosting a UBC-associated conference and want to make the proceedings openly available online via cIRcle? Contact us via the cIRcle Contact Form.
If you’re a UBC faculty member or student who wishes to deposit your own paper or presentation from a conference, see cIRcle’s Submissions page.
Our access to National Theatre Collection (1 and 2) and Royal Shakespeare Collection is now via Alexander Street instead of Bloomsbury’s Drama Online.
This switchover happened more suddenly then we thought it would and the eResources team is working on changing the links.
In the meantime, to obtain access to these videos, please search for them at the below links:
Welcome to new and returning students!
- From the Law Library Staff
See https://hours.library.ubc.ca/#view-law for up-to-date hours, including exception & holiday hours.