The content digitized by us here at the UBC Digitization Centre began as material held at various UBC Library branches including Rare Books and Special Collections, the University Archives, the UBC Asian Library, and countless organizations and community-based archives across BC, Canada and abroad.
This year, we are excited to celebrate a significant milestone – UBC Open Collections has now made over 300,000+ open access items available to researchers and the public!
Screenshot of UBC Open Collections shortly after hitting the 300,000 item milestone
As a way to celebrate this milestone we are taking a retrospective romp through the 15-year history of the Digitization Centre in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
After 15 years, Open Collections has seen the following additional milestones:
110+ unique Collections
300,000+ unique digital objects
Over 900 million item views
Over 60 million item downloads
Our First Collection
The first collection we ever digitized was the German Consulate Fonds in collaboration with UBC Library Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC) in 2011. This collection included 98 items of correspondence, reports, and memoranda from multiple German consulates located in Canada between 1909 and 1939. You can learn more about the collection from this post from 2022.
Boykott, 1935 – 1939
The Digitization Centre in 2011
We also made our first blog post in 2011 which featured a picture of the space and a YouTube Tour of our office.
Here is a timeline of some the projects we were working on in 2012, taken from this blog post.
Digital Initiatives Projects: Gantt Chart, December 2012
2014: Expansion
In 2014, the Digitization Centre expanded and we added 5 new book scanners, more space for our large format TTI scanner and a new workspace. Here’s what the same locations look like now:
In 2015, we launched a brand new digital portal which we introduced in this blog post. This is what users previously saw when they accessed our digital interface, and what it looks like today:
UBC Digital Collections, November 2011
UBC Digital Collections, August 17, 2026
Who Is Using Our Collections?
In 2018, our collections were accessed mainly by residents of Canada, but had growing interest in the United States, United Kingdom, China, Japan, India, and other countries.
Today we are still most popular in Canada and the US, but have a growing number of users in the UK, India, Asia, Mexico, Brazil, Germany and the Philippines and the amount of views we get has increased tenfold.
Google Analytics Map, August 19, 2025 to August 19, 2026
Thank you for reading this post and thank you to all of our hard-working partners and collaborators that made our collections possible.
We hope to continue to build sustainable digital collections to support and enrich the educational, cultural and economic endeavors of the University, the people of British Columbia, and communities beyond for many more years to come.
We highly recommend you take a moment to check out cIRcle’s post on this exciting milestone and if you’re curious about the work we do here at the Digitization Centre check out some of these related posts on the history of the Centre and the Behind-the-Scenes details of our digitization work.
When Open Collections launched in October 2015, it offered improved search and discovery of UBC’s teaching and research materials, and connected the many items archived in cIRcle with digital objects stewarded by other units across the Library. The cIRcle Impact and Activity Report 2015-2016 highlighted the increase in item views and downloads following the launch of Open Collections. The improved user interface & expanded user reach have been a notable feature in cIRcle’s Impact & Activity reports almost every year since.
Open Collections provided cIRcle’s users with a new way to access UBC’s open access teaching and research outputs, leveraging full-text indexing, search facets, and the Open Collections API. In the decade since launch, there have been numerous technical enhancements to Open Collection’s user interface and indexing, and cIRcle continues to expand and enhance item metadata, providing new access points like Supervisor names for theses & dissertations and increasing support for non-English and multi-lingual materials.
With UBC’s outputs openly accessible to users around the globe, we can see connections being built over time. Item-level usage statistics, such as those seen below the item metadata for Praxis Dialogues: Academic Engagements with Knowledge in the World, help us see trends in item engagement and provide visual insights into how far-reaching the work can be.
Trending upwards
In the decade since Open Collections launched, UBC Library has archived more than 150,000 items. cIRcle content in Open Collections has steadily grown, from more than 50,000 items in October 2015 to nearly 90,000 in August 2026.
The range and variety of publications shared via cIRcle continue to evolve as the University and its community progress: from the University’s first 100 theses dating back to 1919, to now over 55,000 theses and dissertations from UBC’s esteemed alumni, and thousands of publications, reports, and alternative research outputs from UBC’s faculty, staff, students, and broader community.
This week we are pleased to announce that there is a new collection available on Open Collections!
The Democratwas the official publication of the British Columbia New Democratic Party (NDP) from 1961 until 2014. It provided NDP members and other readers with news of party activities, information on a wide range of public policy issues, NDP convention debates, and perspectives from elected members both provincially and federally – as well as regular commentary on provincial and federal election strategies and results.
The collection offers fascinating insights to researchers in the fields of history, politics, the environment, labour, and social equity as well as closer insight into one of BC’s biggest political parties that has shaped the history and politics of our province since the BC NDP was founded in 1933 as the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, adopting the New Democratic Party name in 1961.
Overall, the collection includes 400+ issues spanning 53 years of BC political history and is sure to contain many interesting insights for both current and future faculty, students, and outside researchers.
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, […]
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 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.
