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.

Murder in the Archives (pt. 2/2)

Murder and Magic

I know that I said I prefer real murder stories to fictional ones, but all rules have exceptions. My exception is fantasy. So, when I was scrolling through our catalogue for “murder”, I couldn’t help but stop at Murder and Magic by Randall Garrett (call number: F12827).

Murder in the Archives (pt. 1/2)

The Case of Valentine Shortis

Back in November, I began reading The Complete Tales of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, and although I’m not the biggest fan, it came in handy with this. No, it didn’t inspire me to write about everyone’s favourite cocaine addict, but it did remind me that when it comes to murder stories, I much prefer nonfiction to fiction, which prompted me to look for other murder-related books in our catalogue. This led me to a book called The Case of Valentine Shortis: A True Story of Crime and Politics in Canada by Martin Friedland (call number: G9256).

Volleyball practice, March 7th 1973

Hi folks! One of the projects I'm working on involves doing tonnes of scanning for our 60th Anniversary Image Bank. Many of the images are pretty fun!

Negatives to Nuremberg

Hi! I’m Elakkiya, a student in English and Classical Studies, doing my co-op term as the Special Collections & Archives Project Assistant. I would begin by saying that so far it’s been going well and I’m looking forward to the next four months, but I can’t say that…

Ends and New Beginnings

Hello everybody,

Its Graham here, come to say thank you and goodbye with my last blog post as my co-op term at the University of Waterloo Library Special Collections & Archives comes to end. These past 8 months have been an amazing time; I have learned so much, had a fabulous amount of experience, and met some great people along the way. I wanted to publish my last blog post with a short description of the experiences I have had along the way.

Much cheaper in a few years

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.

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.

Lunch and learn

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!

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