Archives by date

Thanks to The Dependent Magazine for the reminder that yesterday was the anniversary of the Greenhill Park explosion in Vancouver Harbour on March 6, 1945.  The S.S. Greenhill Park was a freighter and the explosion, initially blamed on improper storage of combustible materials, killed 8 longshoremen and injured 19 other workers.

Sources much later told late-Vancouver historian Chuck Davis, the explosion was to be blamed on a deadly combination of sodium chlorate, stowed whiskey, and a match struck beneath the deck. You can read about this story on the History of Metropolitan Vancouver.

In the Chung Collection, we have archival material which originated with Hugh Robinson, who was on the board of inquiry for the explosion. The material includes inquiry proceedings, correspondence, notes, clippings, and mechanical drawings of the ship. They can be found in the database by searching for “Green Hill Park” or for “Robinson, Hugh.”

The helpful folks in our Systems department at UBC Library have made a significant upgrade to the search functionality of the Chung Collection website: you can now choose to search only for items which have an online version currently available. This is a great option for those who are using the collection from away and are unable to come and see the items in person (or who prefer to do research at home in their pyjamas).

From the Quick Search box on the home page, the Search page or the Advanced Search page just choose “Online” in the new “Availability” box. The database will then retrieve records for items with an online version when you perform your search. To see the online version, click on the thumbnail view which appears in the record for each item.

The Japanese Canadian National Museum has opened an exhibition of photographs called “Lost and Found.” They hope that visitors to the exhibition will recognize people or landmarks in the photographs and contribute this knowledge by leaving a note on pages posted for this purpose beside the photographs.  To learn more about the exhibition and for location and hours, click here.

This is a challenge in many archival and museum collections, and the Chung Collection is no exception- for example, try searching for portraits of Chinese men or women and you’ll see that we lack identifying information for many of them. If you recognize someone or have other information to share, you can always leave a comment in the Digital Collection version of the photograph. To get to the full digital version, click on the thumbnail view.

Congratulations to our colleagues at the University of Victoria Archives-  a gift of $26,000 from the Victoria Foundation has been announced to digitize and translate the archives of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association.  Since many of the documents in this archival collection are in traditional Chinese script, this funding will make the material more accesible to scholars and students who cannot read the script.

You can read more about the funding announcement here ; you can read more about the collection here.