Collection strengths

Special Collections & Archives' (SCA) collection strengths support research, teaching and learning at the University of Waterloo. They include:

• Architecture and planning
• Campus experience
• Changing climate and the natural environment
• Creative process
• Faculty papers
• History of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM)
• Indigenous Peoples
• Print culture
• Race, racism, and colonialism
• Regional development, industry, and settlement
• Reproductive rights and justice
• Sport, recreation, and leisure
• Women's studies, gender, and sexuality 
• World wars and global conflict

Please note that some collections fall into one or more strength area. Please see the Archives Database for a full list of SCA collections.

SCA supports research, teaching and learning in the broad fields of architecture and planning with a variety of primary sources. Included are the personal papers and drawings of architects and architectural historians such as W.H.E. Schmalz, Arthur Gordon Shoosmith, Ross Dixon, John Ivan Rempel, and William Dendy. The department maintains collections focused on conservation efforts to preserve Ontario’s built environment, including the records of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario: North Waterloo Region and the Breithaupt Hewetson Clark Collection, which also includes records documenting the development of Guildwood Village in Scarborough, Ontario.

Collections focused on the development of the Region of Waterloo including maps and fire insurance plans, the papers of Herbert Johnston, a city engineer who work with local cities and townships, and the papers of Bill Thomson, an urban planner who worked extensively in the Region and served as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Waterloo in the School of Urban and Regional Planning are also available. These collections are supplemented by several acquisitions featuring plans and drawings of local buildings and homes, and a selection of rare books on architecture and design.

SCA maintains collections that document the experiences of students, faculty, and staff at the University of Waterloo. This includes print runs of Imprint, Gazette, and MathNews, and photographs taken as part of the University’s Graphic Services. The department holds a selection of school apparel and general ephemera, as well as the records of the Faculty Association (FAUW), the Librarians' and Archivists' Association of the University of Waterloo, and Glow Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity (formerly the Gay Liberation Organization of Waterloo). SCA is also home to newsletters published by the University of Waterloo Staff Association and a variety of University of Waterloo Oral Histories.

SCA maintains print and archival collections relating to the environment, specifically issues of climate change, water, zoology, conservation, and Arctic and natural resources management in Ontario in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Archival collections include those of individual activists and scholars such as George and Alida Burrett, Anne Innis Dagg, John D. Detwiler, H.B.N. Hynes, and Linda Mortsch. In addition, the department holds archival collections of advocacy and community organizations such as the Canadian Coalition on Acid Rain, Grand River Conservation Authority, Muskoka Lakes Association, and the Walter Bean Community Trails Foundation.

SCA is home to rare books and special collections that document innovation through the creative process, along with the steps taken when generating new and original ideas, concepts, or artistic expressions. Collections include a selection of papers from twentieth-century Canadian artists and authors of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and drama such Alice Mary Hagen, David Hill, Elaine M. Catley, Eric P. McCormack, John Herbert, and Jane and Tony Urquhart. 

Combined, the collections document all stages of the creative arts process including handwritten manuscripts, typescripts, computer outputs, drafts, revisions and proofs, sketchbooks, idea books, original illustrations, and artworks. Many of these collections also include photographs, correspondence, diaries, ephemera, and other material that reveal additional insight into the artistic creative process.

SCA holds a growing collection of faculty papers that document pedagogical practice, approaches to research, and community and professional service undertaken at the University of Waterloo. . The department has the personal papers of Ralph Chou, Anne Innis Dagg, John English, Isobel MacKay, Francis Kathleen Montgomery, Nancy-Lou Patterson, Ralph Stanton and Bernard Suits. SCA also maintains collections related to former presidents of the University of Waterloo including Joseph Gerald Hagey and James Downey, as well as Waterloo’s first Chancellor, Dana Porter.

SCA maintains a variety of print and archival collections regarding the history of mathematics, particularly in relation to geometry and computer science. The department holds 45 editions of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry and 110 nineteenth-century mathematic rare books. In addition, the department holds a manuscript by Auguste Bienaime Desire Pioch about calculus, a copy of Lorenzo Mascheroni’s manuscript about geometrical problems, and notebooks containing mathematical problems, solutions, and notes that belonged to Thomas Stowellv. Moreover, the department has the papers of some Waterloo faculty members who left their mark in STEMM fields including Donald Cowan, J. Wesley Graham, Ralph Stanton, and undergraduate student William Kindree, who was involved in WATFOR 360.

SCA also maintains collections related to the history of women in STEMM, including the work of zoologist Anne Innis Dagg, public health advocate Catherine Taylor, Elizabeth Smith Shortt, one of the first women in Canada to receive a medical degree, and Marie Stopes, who was the first woman appointed to the science staff at the University of Manchester in 1904, known for eugenics and women’s rights advocacy.

SCA maintains many examples of printed materials from the beginning of the hand press era to today. This includes artists’ books by Greg Curnoe, Sara Press, and Damien Hirst, as well as editions of books, newsletters, magazine, and zines printed by small presses. SCA’s book collection has many rare volumes featuring fine binding, including examples from well-known bookbinders such as Joseph Zaehnsdorf and Sangorski & Sutcliffe. In addition, the department holds rare editions and early printings of books produced by private presses like the Strawberry Hill Press, the Kelmscott Press, and the Hogarth Press, as well as hundreds of pulp fiction books in the Lesbian Literature Collection and the bpNichol Library of Science Fiction that reflect the genre’s graphic and colourful art. Also available are the organizational records of records of Dumont Press Graphix that document the radical roots of Kitchener-Waterloo’s typesetting shop in the 1970s and 1980s.

SCA supports research on race, racism, and colonization through a range of print material and archival collections. These include a growing number of contemporary periodicals and zines focused on and produced by equity deserving communities both re-claiming and celebrating cultural practices prohibited or lost during colonization.

The department holds records that reflect multiple perspectives on the advancement and impact of colonialism. Examples include the journals and other records of Colin Rankin and Donald McKay, the photograph album of Canadian and British missionaries in India, five land grants issued by the Department of Indian Affairs bestowing lands formerly promised to the Ojibwe and Odawa of Manitoulin Island, and a variety of Indigenous publications written by and about First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples, groups and associations. Additionally, the department holds the research and publications of Waterloo’s Sally Weaver, an anthropologist whose work focused on land rights and sovereignty for Indigenous peoples in Canada and Australia. 

Further of note are editions of Black News, a Brooklyn-based publication from the 1970s documenting the experiences of Black communities at a critical moment in the history of the Civil Rights Movement, and Camilla Young's photograph album, documenting the upbringing and day-to-day life of an African-American woman from New Jersey between the mid-1940s to the 1980s. The department also houses a Black Experience Collection of pulp fiction titles, and a selection of Black Oral Histories with students, faculty and staff connected to the University of Waterloo.

SCA holds a variety of local history resources related to development, industry, and settlement in what is today the Region of Waterloo. Collections include maps, fire insurance plans, business and city directories, yearbooks from local high schools, government documents outlining local county or village by-laws, and newspapers including restored copies of issues of the Berliner Journal for the years 1859-1889. The department is also home to the Kitchener-Waterloo Photographic Negative Collection, which documents local news events, community activities, regional development, and human-interest stories between 1938-2001.

Many of SCA’s local history collections consist of the institutional archives of local businesses and organizations, such as Dare Foods Limited, Electrohome, Fritsch Pharmacy, the Dominion Rubber Company, Kitchener-Waterloo Record, and the Rotary Club of Kitchener. In addition, the department maintains the papers the Breithaupt, Bolender Ball, Ratz, Schantz, Schneider, and Seagram families, among many others. These collections complement several printed genealogies, family histories, and monographs also held by the department.

Combined, topics of note in these collections include cultural and community association development, family planning, mourning and grief as understood through spiritualism, and the lives of early settler families, including those of women and children.

SCA has a selection of print and archival material that document the history of birth control in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, women’s reproductive health, and family planning. Collections include the organizational papers of the Parents' Information Bureau, a Kitchener-based clinic for family planning and birth control set up by A.R. Kaufman of the Kaufman Rubber Company, and records related to Marie Stopes, the founder of Mother's Clinic for Constructive Birth Control, the world’s first birth control clinic.

In addition to documenting the early advancement of reproductive rights, SCA's collections support research about eugenics-informed rhetoric used to advance reproductive issues and advocacy in and outside of feminist circles. SCA also holds records and trial transcripts related to the trial of Dorothea Palmer, who was arrested in 1936 for advertising birth control to women in the Eastview neighbourhood of Ottawa.

SCA holds print and archival material that document sport, recreation and leisure activities in the Region of Waterloo and beyond. These include cookbooks, scrapbooks, knitting and crafting patterns, and ephemera and photographs related to theatre and performance, SCA also maintains the records of various organizations including the Concordia Club, the Kitchener-Waterloo Young Men's Christian Association, the Young Women's Christian Association of Kitchener-Waterloo, and Westmount Golf and Country Club.

Inactive collecting area

SCA maintains, but no longer actively collects, records and rare books related to the history and performance of dance. These collections contain material describing the history of various types of dance including ancient dance and sport (particularly as performed by the Greeks), Scottish dancing, as well as the cotillion, waltz, minuet, and the quadrille. Additionally, the collections feature a significant amount of material related to ballet including choreography, dance notations, lithographs, engravings, over 150 rare books, and records detailing the scheduling and planning of the Vestris Prize for choreography.

Dance related collections were acquired to support the Department of Dance within the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences, and dance courses that began being offered during the 1969-1970 school year, which predated the department’s founding as an independent program in 1972. The Dance Program was closed in 1996.

SCA was founded in 1976 with a significant collection of materials related to women’s history and women’s studies as the cornerstone of the department. Acquired in 1967 by university librarian Doris Lewis from the National Council of Women of Canada, the donation included the Council’s library on the history of women in Canada. Present in these collections are the papers of individual women and women’s organizations, and reference files that support the study of women’s history in Canada from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. In general, the collections fall into the following broad categories: birth control and eugenics, broadcasting and journalism, domestic arts, education, medicine and science, organizations, politics, women’s rights and suffrage, and writers.

SCA's ever-growing book and periodical collections have a wide historical and geographical focus, including works on the role and place of women in society from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Of note is the British Women's Periodicals Collection, which consists of some 35,000 issues of British women's magazines published from 1893 to 1977 that cover topics such as cooking, crafts, advice, fashion, and health, along with advertisements illustrating contemporary attitudes and concerns.

In addition, SCA actively collects materials that support the study of gender diversity, sexuality, and social justice, including collections that document intersectional and/or racialized identities. Current collections include poems, plays, essays, and other works by John Herbert, a Canadian playwright and theatre director, best-known for his play, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, and the records of the Glow Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity at the University of Waterloo, the longest-running queer and trans student organization in Canada. Additional collections include zines authored by and focused on queer, trans and Two-Spirit people, and a wide selection of paperback books featuring lesbian themes by authors such as Ann Bannon, Artemis Smith, and Randy Salem.

SCA holds collections related to the First and Second World Wars as well as the interwar and post-war periods. Several collections feature the diaries, photographs, memorabilia, military decorations, correspondence, and scrapbooks of those who served, including Frederick Arthur Edmonds, W.E. Short, John Gartshore Martin, Kenneth Germany Rowntree, and Joseph Illig, among others. In addition, the department holds collections related to Cameron Clare Hill and Jerzy-Tadeusz Pindera, both of whom were captured as prisoners of war. Other collections include material documenting the lives and activities of the Keffer family while living in Germany during the interwar period and material related to Gladys Lilian King documenting her work experiences in England during the First World War. The department also holds reports, studies, manuals, and radio broadcast transcripts related to Second World War propaganda research, many of which were written by the British Broadcasting Corporation.