Blog posts archive

One of the projects I'm currently working on involves wading through the approximately 13000 letters in the Breithaupt Hewetson Clark collection. Earlier this week, I came across this hard-to-believe letter from Constance Perrin to H. Spencer Clark, in which she discusses her upcoming trip to Europe and the price of long-distance phone calls.

Hello Readers,

Graham here again, to let you know that today’s blog post may make you squirm but it's bound to provide a little food for thought!

Hello! I’m Graham, a University of Toronto archival studies student currently on an 8-month co-op term in Special Collections & Archives. Today, June 2, is the 40^th anniversary of the official opening of the Doris Lewis Rare Book Room.

Hi, my name is Sue and I am a Library Associate in Special Collections & Archives. When I started here in November 2015 I knew there would be a lot of variety to my days, but I hadn’t anticipated just how much!

With our blog, we like to profile some of the interesting, curious or one of a kind items from our archival collections and rare books. We also want to show you what we do here day to day to help demystify the archives world.

This week, while processing a new collection, we came across this lovely collection of new typefaces from 1975, From Letragraphica Some New Faces. Each typeface is shown, with an accompanying photograph on the facing page of a person presumably embodying its style.

One fine morning last November, a gentleman named Eric Rumble walked through our door, looking for pictures for an exhibit he was curating for the City of Kitchener, called Make It Kitchener. The exhibit featured modern images reflecting the city's economic development strategy coupled with similarly themed images from its past (that's where we came in.)

Special Collections & Archives is committed to student success and we support faculties and departments in class or in library instruction using our collections.  One example of this recently took place when we welcomed Professor Ian Milligan’s class (HIST 250) from the department of history to Special Collections & Archives.  The class was divided into 2 groups; one group visited us while the second attended a session led by the library’s history librarian Jane Forgay, about research strategies, tools, and library services.

Last term, Special Collections & Archives received 150 Women's Studies 101 students to help us transcribe the notebooks of Alice Riggs Hunt.