Digital Collections
Peel library collections can be explored online through an award-winning series of expertly curated digital exhibitions featuring images of rare materials.
Frequently requested Peel materials are digitized and added to the Bruce Peel Special Collections on the Internet Archive. Highlights in this collection include the 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 Collection, and the Ariel Bension Sephardic Manuscript Collection, as well as selections from the Gregory Javitch Collection of books about Indigenous peoples and the Dr Ronald B. Madge Entomology Collection.
The scanning/photographing of sometimes fragile, rare print materials involves considerable risk and expense, so we should not be surprised that less than 2% 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 housed in Bruce Peel Special Collections.
Online: Digital surrogates are available on the Internet Archive.
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 ?efrou 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).
Presentation copy of the original Treaty No. 7 from 1877 (KID 13 1877 folio), in the collection of Treaty parchments.
Full-page miniature from Horae Beatae Virginis Mariae, a Medieval Book of Hours (BX 2080 C38).