Lydia Dotto 1949-2022

Lydia Dotto with King Penguins in Gold Harbour, South Georgia Islands, Antarctica

Special Collections & Archives (SCA) is sad to announce that Lydia Dotto passed away on September 17, 2022.

Stranger Shoes

The new season of Stranger Things is out and it contains a snippet that links to our very own Special Collections & Archives department. The new season is about a newly opened Starcourt Mall which has become the focal point of the town causing other stores to be run out of business. While everyone is at the mall, there are power fluctuations that trigger Will’s (the main character’s) awareness of something not so good.

Portia White's debut

“First you dream, then you lace up your boots.”

Sounds like good advice, don’t you think?

Romance & Hospitals

Another special (and sort of unusual) collection that the archives holds is Hospital Romances. This collection consists of short picture romances, each one with different characters and plot twists, all occurring in the same setting: the hospital. The main focus is specifically on the nurses, and their complex and romantic relationships with the doctors.

An Arab past

Everyone is interested in reading about their country’s past or coming across some old photographs of how their city looked like back in the day. For me, anything I find that relates to my country (I’m Lebanese) or to any country in the Arab region makes me feel proud of my cultural background. When I started working in the Special Collections & Archives department, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity for me to search for any material on Arab history. And luckily, I did.

De-framed World War 1 Photograph

I have been on a kick lately de-framing and cataloguing materials that were donated to us in non-archival friendly frames. One of the recent items I have had the pleasure of describing is this incredible panoramic photograph of the Western Ontario Regiment training at Carling Heights in London, Ontario on August 1, 1918. The photograph is 143 cm (4 feet 8 inches long) and shows members of the regiment engaging in various callisthenic looking training exercises.

What I did on your summer vacation

Since I started back in February, I have been working on a variety of projects to improve online access to our holdings. Beyond answering research requests and providing digital project(s) support to my colleagues, a lot of my energy is focused on cleaning up and improving descriptive records. The work is important because it impacts how easily we can find material that supports specific research areas and how efficiently we can migrate the related information to different platforms.

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