Hours: Monday to Friday 10:00am-4:30pm.
Location: 520 Taylor Family Digital Library, 2500 University Dr. NW, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4.
Contact: asc@ucalgary.libanswers.com, 403-220-3958 (Archives and Special Collections); tmmlibrary@ucalgary.ca, 403-410-2340 x.2621 (Military Museums Library and Archives)
Access: Open by appointment to public; Contact Archives and Special Collections to book an appointment. Materials require at least a day’s notice for retrieval.
Website: https://asc.ucalgary.ca/
The University of Calgary Archives and Special Collections contains the records of the university and has strengths in military records, naval records, immigration, political papers, and government records. The archive also houses some important materials for Canadian history, such as the fonds of well-known suffragist Nellie McClung (1873-1951). There are also more tangentially related records that might be of interest, such as those of the Alberta Royal Commission on Education and Anglican Church of Canada (Calgary Diocese).
There are materials specific to the history of medicine, such the personal collection of Lewis E.C. Davies, a medical doctor and Zone Superintendent for the Canadian Department of National Health and Welfare whose records include medical surveys, travel diaries, and hospital reports of Inuit tuberculosis. The archive also holds the fonds of the Holy Cross School of Nursing (Calgary) (1910-1920, 1947-1979) and the Foothills Hospital School of Nursing (1961-1995).
In addition to materials directly related to the history of medicine, the university has several noteworthy collection on the military and defense. They house the records of the Naval Association of Canada (1919-2014), which includes 38 boxes of text (correspondences, publications, and administrative records) and 174 photographs. The Timothy Travers interview collection (ca. 1978) has 24 sound recordings of World War I veterans. The John Mellor records include 1.6m of textual and other records related to the Dieppe Raid during the Second World War. There are numerous other records related to the World Wars amongst private papers, such as the First Aid manual from World War I in the fonds of William Melvin Ramsay (1899-1988).
The archive has federal records that discuss immigration in the early twentieth century. These include the archives of the Department of Immigration and Colonization, comprising of materials that discuss the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act. Amongst its private collections are correspondences and recipes of Dorothy Allen Gray (1908-1990), author and food connoisseur who worked with the Citizenship Council to teach Canadian cooking to immigrants. The records of Gertrude Laing (1905-2005) offer a study of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963-2006).
There are important records related to the study of Canadian geography and environment including the Royal Commission on Energy fonds (1950-59), records related to the proposed Montreal and Trans-Canada pipeline projects in the James H. Gray collection, and the fonds of Canadian Biologist Frits Johansen (1882-1957) who participated in the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913-1918.
The University of Calgary also has records related to Aboriginal history in Canada. The John Lee Laurie (1899-1959) records, dating from 1955-1957, has manuscripts discussing the history of the Stoney (Assiniboin) Tribe, information and pictures of tribe members, and other records about the history of Aboriginals in Alberta.
For online researchers, the University of Alberta Archive has a Digital Collections webpage that covers subjects like the history of Alberta, politics, geography, and more. The Archive also has a Digital Image Repository that houses 10, 000 images related to the architectural history of Canada.