Since 1916 the Vancouver Institute (VI) has sponsored regular lectures of general public interest, and in so doing has fostered a liaison between “town-and-gown”. Held weekly during the spring and fall academic terms these free public lectures were initially presented at the Assembly Hall located on UBC’s original Fairview campus. In 1929 the lectures moved to the University’s Point Grey campus where they have become a popular Saturday night fixture. Operating on a modest budget supported by membership fees the Institute has presented an eclectic range of topics presented by notable local, national and international speakers.
Since 2009, the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre has webcasted select lectures from the Vancouver Institute. These can be found on our IKBLC webcast page. Past lectures can now also be found on UBC Library’s cIRcle’s Vancouver Institute community collections page. Just click here to find more lectures archived from previous years.
In 1975 the VI began recording the lectures and the resulting audio and video tapes have been preserved in the University Archives. To help promote greater access to these valuable presentations the UBC Library, in partnership with the Institute, University Archives began digitizing and providing on-line access to these lectures. While the content of some of the tapes may now be a little dated, Archives felt it important to include as many as possible to both convey a sense of the state-of-the-art information at a particular time as well as to provide an overview of the scope of the lecture topics.
For information about the early history of the Vancouver Institute see Eric Damer’s 1995 MA thesis entitled, Town and gown: the early history of the Vancouver Institute, in cIRcle.
For a complete listing of VI lectures and additional information see http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/vaninsti.html.