Peel's doors will be closed and services significantly reduced from April-August 2024

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Don’t miss out! 

If you want to view the current exhibition (Mercantile Mobility: Chinese Merchants in Western Canada) or study rare materials in one of Peel’s reading rooms, then you will need to do so before the end of March because Peel’s doors are closed and services significantly reduced from April–August to allow the team to focus on backend operations.

Full service resumes in September.

Detailed information is available here.

Mercantile Mobility: Chinese Merchants in Western Canada (Exhibition)

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Mercantile Mobility: Chinese Merchants in Western Canada

Curated by U of A alumna Helen Kwan Yee Cheung, this exhibition takes us on a journey through time, from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, to explore what happened to Chinese immigrant workers after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which they helped to build. The curator presents a new perspective on the history and contributions of Chinese immigrants in Canada by profiling those workers who started from the ground up to become merchants and considering how they progressed from mere survival to becoming successful as entrepreneurs. This exhibition examines the distinctive socio-economic landscape where this dynamic group carved out their own niche and quietly propelled the Canadian economy; it reveals how they helped to build communities through movements of products at the municipal, provincial, and global levels.  Their business ventures are explored through rare archival documents and images collected over a decade by the curator through a community-based process and through the ongoing acquisition efforts of Bruce Peel Special Collections. Pre-arranged group visits are offered on Monday afternoons hosted in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English by Helen Cheung, Jeff Papineau, and Michaela Morrow. Unfortunately, the award-winning exhibition catalogue is out of print.


Exhibition in Bruce Peel Special Collections 
(lower level of Rutherford South)
Open 1-4pm Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons from 24 May 2023 to 28 March 2024

Group Exhibition Visits
Small groups are offered a brief introduction to the exhibition in English, Cantonese, or Mandarin before being given a chance to browse and talk between 1-4pm on Mondays.  Advance booking is required. To inquire, email bpsc@ualberta.ca

Written by Helen Kwan Yee Cheung, designed by Kevin Zak, and edited by Cheryl Cundell, the Mercantile Mobility catalogue won two Awards of Excellence–in both the book and exhibition catalogue categories–as well as Honorable Mention in the categories of cover design for both books and exhibition catalogues, a quadfecta in the annual UCDA Design Competition (Atlanta, Georgia, 2023) from the University & College Designers Association. This multi-award-winning catalogue is now out of print.

See "New U of A Library Exhibition Honours Chinese Immigrant Contributions," by Taylor Downing in The Quad (25 May 2023).






Peel's hours and services

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HOURS & SERVICES AT BRUCE PEEL SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Don’t miss out! If you want to view the current exhibition (Mercantile Mobility) or examine rare materials in one of Peel’s reading rooms, then you will need to do so by 28 March 2024 because Peel’s doors are closed and services significantly reduced during the summer months (April-August) to allow the team to focus on backend operations.

REGULAR EXHIBITION HOURS (September through March)
Mondays 1-4pm: Reserved for pre-arranged group visits*
Tuesdays: Closed
Wednesdays-Fridays 1-4pm: Open for drop-in visitors

REGULAR RESEARCH HOURS (September through March)
Mondays: No research appointments
Tuesdays 1-4pm: Reserved for quiet research, by appointment*
Wednesdays-Fridays 1-4pm: By appointment*

LIMITED SUMMER SERVICE (April through August)
Peel’s exhibitions, workshops, and drop-in services are suspended to allow the team to focus on backend operations. Limited remote research services continue to be available and there is a very limited capacity to accommodate the most urgent requests from researchers who need to view rare print materials and simply cannot wait until the fall term begins. NOTE: During this summer period, non-circulating materials housed at RCRF or that have been brought in via Interlibrary Loan can only be used in the reading room at U of A Archives.

*To request a research appointment or a group exhibition visit (with an introduction that can be offered in Cantonese or Mandarin on request), please write to us at bpsc@ualberta.ca.

Research appointments: To view rare materials held in Bruce Peel Special Collections, please write to us at bpsc@ualberta.ca to request an appointment well in advance, listing the requested materials including author, title, and call number for each item, and offering some date options. We book research appointments on a first-come, first-served basis, so there may be a delay, but we will do our best to be accommodating. Normal reading room policies and protocols, designed to protect rare materials, are in force.

Remote Research Services: The Peel team serves researchers' needs remotely by answering questions about rare materials, providing researchers with images of materials not otherwise available (whenever possible), and providing links to digital resources that may help to meet current research and teaching needs (see "Peel materials online"). If you have questions that relate to materials housed in Bruce Peel Special Collections, you can send us an email at bpsc@ualberta.ca.

Visiting Researchers: If you are planning to travel to the Edmonton area to carry out research at Bruce Peel Special Collections, we strongly recommend that you do so during the regular academic year to avoid our limited summer service period. Whenever you plan to visit, it is important to contact us at bpsc@ualberta.ca well in advance so that we have every opportunity to accommodate your needs.

Like other locations of the University of Alberta Library, Bruce Peel Special Collections is open to all researchers, including faculty, staff, students, and members of the general public.

Peel materials online

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Bruce Peel Special Collections offers a limited number of research appointments each week (September-March), but some researchers will want to consider using digital resources where possible, and professors who are planning classes are encouraged to make use of rare materials that can be examined either as print originals or using digital reproductions, so that all options are available to your students.  

In order to help you to identify digital reproductions of primary source materials, we continue to work to add relevant links to the Research Collections page on Peel's website. Such links will help you to find digital content that has been created by U of A Library, by our colleagues at other institutions, and through collaborative projects, such as the very extensive HathiTrust database.  Also, please note that University of Alberta Library subscribes to numerous online databases, including many that offer digitized primary source materials.

Here are some highlights of Peel's digital resources:

Peel's Digital Exhibitions - Expertly curated and filled with images of rare materials, Peel's award-winning digital exhibition program covers topics from the history of photography (Photographies) to Canadian Women Artists' Books to the source of some of the earliest ideas about witches and witch trials (Tinctor's Foul Treatise). They explore the papers (including photographs) of pioneering Western Canadian journalist Miriam Green Ellis, the complexities of interpreting primary historical materials (Sam Steele's Forty Years in Canada: History or Fiction?), and some of the most frequently-requested rare books in Bruce Peel Special Collections (Honorary Degree Books).

Digitized in Databases - Some of Peel's collections have been partially digitized through databases hosted by major publishers, including the Gregory Javitch Collection of books about Indigenous peoples and the Dr Ronald B. Madge Entomology Collection.

Internet Archive - A selection of Peel materials have been digitized through the Internet Archive, including Treaty parchments (for Treaties 4, 6, 7, & 8), the Tinctor manuscipt, a Medieval Book of Hours, a collection of English Playbills (1779-1949), the Indigenous Photograph Collection, the Prairie Postcard Collectionin addition to selections from the Gregory Javitch Collection of books about Indigenous peoples and the Dr Ronald B. Madge Entomology Collection.

Good luck with your research!


Where do ideas about witchcraft come from?

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Explore early ideas about witchcraft by learning about a very rare (and sinister) fifteenth-century manuscript housed in University of Alberta's Bruce Peel Special Collections.

Tinctor's Foul Treatise is an award-winning digital exhibition that unlocks the secrets of this special manuscript. The exhibition was mounted in October 2016 by University of Alberta's Bruce Peel Special Collections, and it is the winner of the prestigious 2018 Leab Award (Electronic Exhibitions) from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the American Library Association.

The Arras Witch Treatises is a full English-language translation of two important fifteenth-century source texts (Tinctor's Invectives and the anonymous Recollectioprepared by the curators of Tinctor's Foul Treatise and published by Pennsylvania State University Press (2016) as part of their Magic in History series. This edition is available through University of Alberta Library (BF 1582 A155 2016) and is widely available for sale.

Get a close look—through Archive.org—at the copy of Tinctor's Invectives housed in University of Alberta's Bruce Peel Special Collections.

You can still check out Tinctor's Foul Manual online, a one-hour documentary produced by Paul Kennedy for the CBC's Ideas that has been aired numerous times, most recently on 2 August 2016.


Read "The Travels of a Fifteenth-Century Demonological Manuscript: The University of Alberta's Copy of Jean Taincture's Invectives contre la secte de vaudrie," by Robert Desjardins, Francois Pageau, and Andrew Gow. Florilgelium 33 (26 Aug 2019).

Check out Paula Simons' fascinating exploration of the ways that old ideas about witchcraft continue to haunt us today: "Politics, Powerful Women and Hunting Witches in a New Age of Superstition," Edmonton Journal (29 Oct 2016).  This story helpfully links to a relevant story by Simons: "Witch History takes flight in Rare Manuscript at U of A," Edmonton Journal (27 Oct 2012), and a related blog post "The Witch-Burner's Mein Kampf: Excerpts of Evil" (Oct 2012).

Or this recent article: "300 years on, will thousands of women burned as witches finally get justice?" The Guardian (13 Sept 2020).