“Yes, this is my album”: Victorian Collections of Scraps, Signatures, and Seaweed is a digital exhibit featuring Victorian era scrapbooks and albums held at the University of Victoria Libraries Special Collections and University Archives. Alongside the showcased albums, the exhibit provides a historical overview of the Victorian pastime of collecting things to display inside of books. Drawing from Victorian era manuals, the exhibit focuses on the history and construction of traditional scrapbooks, autograph albums, and seaweed albums. Following each main section, the exhibit includes the “From the Archives” pages; here, viewers can browse the full, digitized versions of the exhibit’s featured albums.

For those interested in further research, the exhibit ends with an annotated list of Victorian scrapbooks/albums that are housed at the University of Victoria Libraries Special Collections and University Archives. This list includes the albums featured in the exhibit, as well as others that may be of interest.

This exhibit features digitized versions of Victorian albums from a variety of archival fonds and collections housed at the University of Victoria Libraries Special Collections and University Archives. These albums include three traditional scrapbooks (see here, here, and here), one celebrity autograph album (here), three friendship autograph albums (here, here, and here), and one seaweed album (here). While the exhibit focuses on the materiality of the featured albums to explore Victorian scrapbooking in general, the “From the Archives” pages provide links to the featured albums’ finding aids (available through UVic’s instance of AtoM). The finding aid descriptions provide information on the albums’ specific contexts of creation, linking them back to other archival documents (not always scrapbooks or albums) from the same creators.

Archival fonds or collections with materials featured in this exhibit:

Edward Morell Holmes fonds (AR069)

English 19th Century Autographs Scrapbook collection (SC198)

Frank and Cecelia Sylvester family fonds (AR281)

Kidman family fonds (SC624)

Mary Henderson collection (SC372)

Muriel Gerrard fonds (SC236)

This exhibit and the work behind it are the result of collaboration among several departments at the University of Victoria Libraries: notably, Special Collections and University Archives, the Digitization Centre, the Digital Scholarship Commons, and Metadata. The exhibit was curated in 2020/2021 by Elizabeth Bassett, over the course of two work terms funded through the University of Victoria Libraries and the Young Canada Works in Heritage Institutions (YCW) program. The YCW program is implemented by the Government of Canada’s Department of Canadian Heritage and delivered by the Canadian Council of Archives.

Elizabeth Bassett, Special Collections and University Archives Digital Access Assistant (YCW)

Tiffany Chan, Digital Scholarship Developer/Analyst, Systems Services

Heather Dean, Associate Director, Special Collections

Page DeWolfe, Library Assistant, Digitization Centre

Karen Dykes, Library Assistant, Metadata

John Frederick, Library Assistant, Special Collections

Braydon Justice, Digital Scholarship Developer/Analyst, Systems Services

Samantha MacFarlane, KULA Managing Editor and Special Projects Administrative Officer

Katharine Mercer, Supervisor, Digitization Centre

Dean Seeman, Head, Metadata

Lara Wilson, Director of Special Collections and University Archivist

This site was built using Blacklight, an open source, Ruby on Rails, discovery and access engine for digital collections. The exhibit was created with the Spotlight for Blacklight plugin.

The logo and banners for this site, designed by Elizabeth Bassett, incorporate images from three of the exhibit’s featured scrapbooks. The image of newspaper scraps is from the Cecelia Davies Sylvester Scrapbook (see AR281). The image of the signatures is from the Ella Kidman Album (see SC624). The image of the seaweed specimen is from the Edward Morell Holmes Herbarium (see AR069).

Items in this exhibit are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. The University of Victoria Libraries Special Collections and University Archives provides digitized materials from their collections to support the teaching and research needs of the university community and partners. Users may reproduce (print or download) items in this collection for research, teaching, or private study. For all other uses, contact Special Collections at speccoll@uvic.ca or 250-721-8257.

UVic Libraries requests that materials reproduced from their digital collections are properly cited, regardless of use. Citation should include: title of the item; name of the collection / fonds it belongs to; “University of Victoria Special Collections and University Archives"; “‘Yes, this is my album’ digital collection”; url for the page the item was found; date the item was viewed. For multi-page items, include the name of the whole resource (e.g. “Cecelia Davies Sylvester Scrapbook”), along with the page number, if available. You may find all of this information in the beige box beneath each image.

Example:

"Cecelia Davies Sylvester Scrapbook." Frank and Cecelia Sylvester family fonds. University of Victoria Special Collections and University Archives. “Yes, this is my album” digital collection. https://exhibits.library.uvic.ca/spotlight/scrapbooks/catalog/21-18874. 26 November 2020.

Questions or comments about the materials represented on this site can be sent to Special Collections at the University of Victoria Libraries, speccoll@uvic.ca.