By sromkey on October 12, 2012
Today is the Day of Digital Archives, and I’m really pleased to be reporting on our experience preserving digital archives here at Rare Books and Special Collections! For the uninitiated, preserving digital archives is extremely challenging because of rapidly changing technology and the relative fragility of digital records- this is why a number of archivists […]
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By sromkey on October 5, 2012
A reminder that Rare Books and Special Collections, University Archives and the Chung Collection will be closed for Thanksgiving on Monday October 8, as are all branches of UBC Library (the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre will be open, but library operations will be closed). Thanksgiving is a time to celebrate the harvest, so we […]
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By sromkey on September 21, 2012
We have come to the end processing the 2012 accrual to the Douglas Coupland fonds, but it is just the beginning for researchers- we’re looking forward to having you in the reading room! As the supervising archivist, this has been a really interesting and rewarding process. I had some questions for our student archivists that […]
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By sromkey on September 6, 2012
Earlier in this blog, we posted about how we are implementing the use of taxonomies to help researchers navigate the new accrual to the Douglas Coupland Fonds. We’re just putting the finishing touches on those tags now, and thought we would offer our readers a first look at what we’ve done. To review: taxonomies in […]
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By sromkey on August 23, 2012
Archivist’s note: We also could have called this post, “Repacking the Douglas Coupland fonds.” We get a lot of questions from the general public about how we choose storage for archival material. Many of these questions can be answered with common sense, sometimes we use more specialized knowledge. Below our student archivists explain their storage […]
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By sromkey on August 20, 2012
Archivists note: This past week was a busy one: the student archivists worked hard on packing the accrual into appropriate containers for storage. All collections need to be re-housed into archivally appropriate containers, but this one is a particular challenge to wrangle because of the oddly shaped and sized objects. Below the students describe some […]
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By sromkey on August 7, 2012
Question: What glitters and was once home to thousands of swarming insects? Answer: The contents of file 184-38 of the Douglas Coupland fonds at UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections. This dazzling bejeweled hornet’s nest has presented us with a unique range of questions… so let’s take a brief tour of the archivist’s approach to […]
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By sromkey on July 31, 2012
Archivists note: This week our student archivists are going to explain how taxonomies, which is like “tagging” only slightly more sophisticated, is helping them draw out important connections in the Douglas Coupland fonds. It does make me reflect on how the technology we use to catalogue (or arrange and describe, in archives jargon) can affect […]
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By sromkey on July 25, 2012
Archivist’s note: When you tell people you’re an archivist, they often assume that we spend a lot of time meticulously re-organizing documents into some kind of “correct” order. This is a misconception- as our student archivists will describe below, maintaining original order is actually an important tenet of archival theory and practice. Here are Dan, […]
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By sromkey on July 18, 2012
We’re very pleased to announce a recent addition (or accrual to use archival language) to the archives of Douglas Coupland (or the Douglas Coupland fonds, again to use the archival terminology). We have been very fortunate to continue our relationship with Doug Coupland since we first acquired his archives in 2008, but for the first […]
Posted in Announcements, Collections, Research and learning, Uncategorized | Tagged with Coupland