Collections

This post was originally published in November 2020. On November 11 we will pause to honour the soldiers that have fought for Canada and to support the Canadian Troops. In addition to pausing for a day to honour the soldiers, I thought another way to appreciate the Canadian soldiers would be to showcase photos of the University of Alberta’s connection to World War I (WWI). With the help of our colleagues at…

This post was written by CJ de Jong, Access Services Coordinator, Librarian and Librarian Lucinda Johnston The last couple of years we have been using Talis Aspire for instructors to create reading lists and reserve course materials in the Library. Instructors use this platform to let us know which materials are being used in a course and we will make sure that, where possible, there is electronic access, and print material is…

So you’re doing research and wondering if the University of Alberta Archives might have relevant materials.  Maybe you’re doing some family genealogy research and your Uncle Bob went to the University of Alberta, or perhaps your professor gave you a local history assignment that requires you to consult primary sources. How do you search the archives, anyways? The University of Alberta Archives (UAA) is the official repository for the permanently valuable records…

This post was originally published on Oct 27, 2020. Cold fall air. Howling wind. Crackling leaves on the ground… Halloween spirit is in the air! Although these images weren’t created to scare, sepia has been generously applied by the passage of time… and they emerge as the perfect backdrop for spooky stories… Let’s start at the iconic Alberta Legislature Building, which looks like it’s holding a flashlight up to its face. A…

This post was written in collaboration with Abirami Muthukumar, Digitization Assistant, and Sarah Severson, Digital Projects Librarian. This is a 3-part series on the Digitization of SEE Magazine and VUE Weekly. In the first part, we gave you an overview of the project, and answer the “how.”  In this part, we outline a short history of the publications (the “what”).  The third part closes out the series with the “why”! The Papers…

Today we are shining a light on resources reflecting the rich culture of Iran as well as their ongoing struggle for women’s rights.  A few weeks ago a young Iranian woman by the name of Mahsa Amini was arrested for wearing a hijab too loosely. Three days later she was dead. Mahsa Amini’s death resulted in a series of large-scale protests in Iran and an international call for change – freedom and…

We have a pretty extensive collection here at the University of Alberta Library. Between print books & periodicals, electronic books, journal articles, streaming video and audio, and miscellaneous kits, games and more, there’s no lack of resources to explore. As Junelle explained in her recent post, there are limits to what we have access to. Sometimes we have to cast our nets wider and borrow items from libraries outside of the NEOS…

The University of Alberta Library fields a number of different questions through our service desks and chat service. A common question that regularly pops up involves the term Interlibrary Loan or ILL for short. But what is an ILL? An Interlibrary Loan refers to an item that does not exist within the U of A Library’s holdings, nor the holdings of NEOS, which is a consortium that U of A belongs to.…

Congratulations to ISTL: Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship, for publishing their 100th issue this month!  With its first issue published way back in 1991, ISTL was an early adopter of the electronic publishing medium. Back then, they were distributed using simple text files, and used ASCII art to represent the logo of STS (Science and Technology Section of the American Library Association)! Over the years, ISTL’s format evolved into HTML and…

This post was written by Katie Cuyler, Librarian (Arts & Law) & Government Information Librarian Today, governments share almost all of their public information on their websites. But, what happens when these websites change? When policies, mandates, or governments change? How can researchers access government information from previous governments? The answer is often through the Wayback Machine and Archive-it. Archive-it and the Wayback Machine are invaluable tools when it comes to accessing…