Art fans, take note: two new exhibitions are now on display at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Beyond the Words features portraits of writers by the late Carl Kohler (1919-2006), a Neo-Modernist/Abstract Swedish artist. Subjects including Franz Kafka, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Günter Grass and others are featured in mediums such as oil painting, woodblock prints and drawings.
Meanwhile, the Generation One exhibition features work from dynamic local artists, including Raymond Chow, Ron Sombilon, Ray Shum, Rubina Rajan and others. This show coincides with explorASIAN, the annual Vancouver Asian Heritage Festival.
Beyond the Words runs until August 31, and Generation One runs until May 31. Both shows appear in the Learning Centre Gallery, located on the second floor of the Learning Centre, adjacent to the circulation desk.
The Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection, a designated national treasure, has a new virtual home.
The handsome website, found at http://chung.library.ubc.ca, highlights the Chung Collection’s three main themes: immigration and settlement, early British Columbia history, and the Canadian Pacific Railway Company.
Focus groups consisting of faculty, staff, students and community members provided feedback on the development of a new site for the Chung Collection, which is housed at UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections division.
Highlights include quick search and advanced search functions, a “most viewed items” feature, an appealing re-design and an extensive catalogue of digitized items.
UBC Library invites you to visit the site and delve into one of Canada’s most exceptional historical collections.
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and presented by International Development Research Centre and co-hosted by UBC and the Canada-India Foundation, there has been much talk of a coming Asian century, to be dominated by the economic strength and political assertion of China and India. This talk will critically scrutinize the claims made on behalf of India, and in particular the belief, held by some Westerners and perhaps by many Indians, that India is a coming superpower. It will acknowledge the durability, against the odds, of India’s national unity and of its democracy. It will appreciate the recent surge in economic growth. At the same time, it will provide a critical analysis of the deep fault-lines within Indian society, politics, economics, and culture, to conclude that the talk of India’s imminent rise to superstardom is highly premature. Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bangalore. Now a full-time writer, he has previously taught at the universities of Yale and Stanford, held the Arné Naess Chair at the University of Oslo, and been the Indo-American Community Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
As part of the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, Randall Jimerson presents on the history of recordkeeping and archives, and reveals that they have often been used to consolidate and enforce political power, often to control or oppress people. Far from being neutral repositories for facts and evidence, archives have always been sites of political, economic, social, and intellectual power. As archivists recognize that neutrality is an illusion they can take positive steps to ensure that the archival record carries the stories of previously marginalized societal groups and supports liberation, accountability, and social justice.
Webcast Sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and lecture hosted by the Department of Asian Studies at UBC as part of the 2nd Annual Celebration of Punjabi in honour of the memory of Harjit K. Sidhu, Professor Farina Mir explores the contours of a colonial-era Punjabi literary formation in India. That is, those individuals who shared in the practices of producing, circulating, performing, and consuming Punjabi literary texts. She will argue that the Punjabi literary formations pragmatic engagements with colonial institutions were far less important than the affective attachments its adherents established with a place, with an old but dynamic corpus of stories, and with the moral sensibility that suffused those stories.
Biography of Speaker
Dr. Farina Mir is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She holds a B.A. (magna cum laude, 1993) from Barnard College in English literature and Asian & Middle Eastern Cultures. She received her Ph.D. in History, with distinction, from Columbia University in 2002. Trained as a historian of colonial and postcolonial South Asia, her research has focused on the social, cultural, and religious history of late-colonial north India.
Selected Articles Available at UBC Library
Mir, F. (2006). Imperial policy, provincial practices: Colonial language policy in nineteenth-century india. The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 43(4), 395-427. [Link]
Mir, F. (2006). Genre and devotion in punjabi popular narratives: Rethinking cultural and religious syncretism.Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48(3), 727-758. [Link]
Mir, F. (2005). Ann grodzins gold and bhoju ram gujar. in the time of trees and sorrows: Nature, power and memory in rajasthan. durham: Duke university press, 2002. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 47(4), 892-896. [Link]
Jack Zipes is one of the worlds leading authorities on fairy tales, writing about and translating them. An internationally renowned scholar and author of more than 50 books on many subjects, he has through his writings transformed research on fairy tales, particularly with respect to how they function in the socialization of readers. Jack Zipes is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.
Sponsored by Green College and the supporting units for the M.A. in Childrens Literature Program (MACL): the School of Library Archival and Information Studies, the Department of English, the Creative Writing Program in the Faculty of Arts, and the Department of Language and Literacy Education in the Faculty of Education. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
UBC has been selected as the host campus for the 2012 meeting of the ALADN Conference.
ALADN, which stands for the Academic Library Advancement and Development Network, is a group that focuses on fundraising and development issues for academic and research libraries in North America. Members include professionals involved in development and advancement.
UBC was chosen as the 2012 site for the ALADN conference following a presentation by Shakeela Begum, UBC Library’s Director of Development, at the recent ALADN gathering in Santa Monica, California. This is a great win for the Library and for UBC, as more than 200 guests are expected to attend the event.
The 2011 conference, entitled Take a Trip through Academic Fundraising, will be held at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Congratulations to UBC Library and the University of British Columbia!
Presented by the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS) Colloquium Series, The Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, which is part of the UBC Library system, has an intriguing and ambitious mission relating to its physical geography and that of the province of BC. As part of a vast campus community, the Learning Centre is charged with a mandate to support academic excellence by providing diverse learning and teaching supports as well as inspiring people spaces. Dedicated to the prosperity of the province and to integrating community into our work here on campus, we also look outward, searching for opportunities to connect and support connections between UBC and communities across BC. How does all this fit within the traditional role of the academic library? Does it or is the Learning Centre an entirely different entity with simply an administrative connection to the UBC Library? Join Learning Centre Director Sandra Singh as she discusses the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, its mission and activities, and its place on both the University campus generally and within the context of the UBC Library. Sandra Singh is Director of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
A handful of First Nations projects and the first out-of-province initiative are among the successful recipients of the 2010/11 B.C. History Digitization Program (BCHDP) awards.
The digitization program, an initiative of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, was launched in 2006. It provides matching funds that help libraries, archives, museums and other organizations digitize unique historical items, including images, print and sound materials.
In 2010/11, the Learning Centre provided nearly $200,000 for 25 projects. Altogether, BDHDP funding has totalled more than $650,000 for 76 projects throughout British Columbia.
Grant funding requests for 2010/11 significantly exceeded available resources and this meant that the adjudication committee had to make some difficult decisions. This year marked the first out-of-province grant, made to the United Church of Canada, which is headquartered in Toronto. It is one of three approved projects involving records relating to First Nations groups in British Columbia. The project will result in the digitization of visual and documentary records relating to Methodist and United Church missions in B.C.
In addition, grant funding has been awarded to eleven photographic digitization projects around the province as well as five applications that featured the digitization of local newspapers.
During the past four years, projects have included photographic collections, community newspapers, oral history recordings, city directories, medical artifacts, three-dimensional fossil specimens and more.
For a complete list of grant recipients and project descriptions, please visit here.
The April 2010 issue of College & Research Libraries News, an American publication, features an image from UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections on the front cover. Some additional information about the image and the UBC Library Vault is provided inside the publication.