Digital Collections
Although researchers have many good reasons to consult rare originals in the reading rooms at Bruce Peel Special Collections, a selection of Peel library materials can also be explored online through an award-winning series of expertly curated digital exhibitions or through the Internet Archive, which provides digital access to a wide range of Peel materials, including Treaty parchments (for Treaties 4, 6, 7, & 8), the Tinctor manuscript (a source of some of our earliest ideas about witchcraft), a Medieval Book of Hours, first editions of both Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), as well as a selection of digitized print materials that are not what they appear to be in Forgers, Fakers, and Publisher-Pirates. It is worth noting that the scanning/photographing of sometimes-fragile rare print materials involves considerable risk and expense, and the result is that less than two percent of rare print materials worldwide have been digitized. This explains why it can be challenging or impossible to find precise early editions online and why we offer this page as a starting place for anyone seeking digital surrogates of rare print materials.
Getting started: Most student researchers will want to employ a series of keyword searches in the University of Alberta Library catalogue in order to find relevant print and digital materials in all U of A library locations and collections, including the Peel library. For more information about research in the Peel library, see Finding and Requesting Peel Library Materials.
Further resources: Several Peel library collections can be at least partially viewed online, including a collection of English Playbills, the Indigenous Photograph Collection, the Prairie Postcard Collection, the Alaska Highway Photographs & Documents collection, the Ariel Bension Sephardic Manuscript Collection, the Gregory Javitch Collection of books about Indigenous peoples, and the Dr Ronald B. Madge Entomology Collection.
Collection Formats: 16th Century, 17th Century, 18th Century, 19th Century, 20th Century, 21st Century, Books, Correspondence, Ephemera, Manuscripts, Photographs, Postcards -- click to see other collections with this format
Sephardic Manuscript page (MS057) in which rabbis of Sefrou ask the rabbis of Fez for aid, in the Ariel Bension Sephardic Manuscript Collection.
Photograph of two Indigenous women and a child in a camp setting in Morley, present-day Alberta, in the Indigenous Photograph Collection.
Illustration of an insect from The English Lepidoptera by Moses Harris (QL 555 G7 H35 1775) in the Dr Ronald B. Madge Entomology Collection.
Playbill for Gaiety Theatre’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in the collection of English Playbills (PN 2594.13 P63 E65).
Parchment copy of Treaty No 7 from 1877 (KID 13 1877 folio).
A Flemish book of hours, a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript with six full-page miniatures and ornate floriated borders (BX 2080 C38).