Photo credit: World War I British press photograph collection, UBC Library Digital Collections
Since the opening of the War Memorial Gym in 1951, UBC has held a ceremony commemorating Remembrance Day. This special occasion is an opportunity for faculty, staff, students and community members to honour and remember all those who served in times of war, military conflict and peace. Everyone is welcome to attend this year’s annual ceremony.
UBC Library also features a wealth of resources relating to this special occasion, including an account of the construction and opening of the War Memorial Gymnasium that also features images of past Remembrance Day ceremonies at the gym. Meanwhile, a Record of Service highlights about 2,000 students, alumni and faculty who served in Canadian or Allied Forces during World War II.
Users can visit the Library’s Digital Collections site to view World War I and World War II posters along with the World War I British press photograph collection.
The Education Library has a Remembrance Day Topic Guide to link teacher candidates and teacher-librarians with relevant resources, along with a bibliography of its Remembrance Day material.
Xwi7xwa Library has launched a special feature entitled Honouring our Aboriginal Veterans: Remembrance Day Collections at Xwi7xwa.
And cIRcle, UBC’s digital repository, includes a number of theses covering a range of Canadian experiences involving war and remembrance. Users can enter relevant keywords – such as “Remembrance Day” and “war” – to find research that ranges from photography to war poetry and much more.
Last May, a special ceremony was held during UBC’s spring congregation to recognize and honour the Japanese Canadian students whose university experience was disrupted in 1942 when they were uprooted and exiled from the B.C. coast. Part of UBC’s acknowledgement included a UBC Library project to digitize Tairiku Nippo, a newspaper documenting Japanese-Canadian life from the early 1900s until 1941, when it was forced to cease publication. The Library also collected and archived stories from individual students. Some of these oral histories were used to create the film A Degree of Justice: Japanese Canadian UBC students of 1942. For more information, please visit the Library’s site.
Finally, this past blog post from Rare Books and Special Collections highlights photos of CPR ships during wartime – additional images can be found by searching the Chung Collection site.