A bounty of historical treasures now lives online
National Gay Conference 1975
The University of Manitoba Libraries has launched UM Digital Collections, a collection of rare and unique digital material about the U of M and the province of Manitoba.
UM Digital Collections, which is still being developed and expanded, will be the University’s single access point to digitized historical artifacts. It currently features over 75,000 digitized items from the holdings of the Libraries, including correspondence, photos, books, newspapers, and moving image and sound recordings.
Libraries Digital Initiatives and Archives staff have worked hard this past year to prepare the system’s content, some of which has never before been made available online, including hundreds of U of M photographs; a complete set of the Brown and Gold, the U of M’s yearbook; the 1969 UMSU-produced film And No Birds Sing; several collections of photographs pertaining to Manitoba’s medical history; and a small collection of 1880s portraits of Winnipeg’s Indigenous peoples.
UM Digital Collections also includes reports of Aboriginal rights advocate Walter Rudnicki, Louis Riel photographs, and other valuable resources for studying Canada’s Indigenous peoples, as well as news clippings, photographs, and programs documenting Manitoba’s rich cultural past, including the Prairie Theatre Exchange and other Winnipeg theatre troupes.
Two-year-old Inuit child, 1927
In addition it is the new home to some of our more popular digital resources, including the Second World War years of The Winnipeg Tribune, the Hamilton family séance photos, rare books like the 1611 first edition King James Bible, the Manitoba Gay and Lesbian Archives, and the Professional Hockey in Winnipeg exhibit.
New content will be continually added to the site as we continue to migrate digital content from other systems. In addition the complete publication run of The Manitoban and the First World War years of The Winnipeg Tribune will be added shortly. Other units on campus will also soon have the opportunity to add their content to the site.
This material is now freely accessible for browsing, searching, and downloading low- or high-resolution copies. UM Digital Collections also provides a secure preservation framework whereby all the content is preserved for the long-term.
The site is still being developed so if you encounter any problems, please notify UMDigitalCollections@umanitoba.ca so that they can be corrected.
Winnipeg Tribune War Cover
Unidentified students in a lab
Research at the University of Manitoba is partially supported by funding from the Government of Canada Research Support Fund.