Collections News

The University of Toronto Press (UTP) recently made an agreement with EBSCO to distribute most of the Press’s journals exclusively via EBSCO databases, effective January 1, 2026. This affects the journals for which we currently have UTP-direct subscriptions. The main impact of this change for UAL is that we will no longer collect new issues of two (2) UTP journals. This is because the only way to do so is to pay for expensive EBSCO database upgrades, which is not justifiable given current budget constraints.

In the context of our UAL collection, there are seven (7) journals affected.

Journals where current access to new issues will continue (with the relevant EBSCO database indicated):

1. Calico (Education Research Complete)
2. Canadian Journal of Communication (Communication & Mass Media Complete)
3. Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality (CINAHL Plus with Full Text)
4. East Asian Pragmatics (Communications & Mass Media Complete)
5. Physiotherapy Canada (CINAHL Plus with Full Text)

Journals whose new contents, January 1 onward, we will no longer have access to:

1. Journal of Veterinary Medical Education (available through CAB Abstracts with Full Text; we have CAB Abstracts)
2. Sociolinguistic Studies (available through MLA with Full Text; we have MLA International Bibliography)

For articles published January 1 onward in these two journals, please recommend ILL.

Curious about Halloween in Edmonton in 1944? You can now search the *expanded* Edmonton Bulletin (1880-1951) collection and find out!

The scope of The Edmonton Bulletin Newspapers collection (initially available on the Peel’s Prairie provinces website up to 1923) has been expanded by 28 years. The publication range available on the Internet Archive now spans 1880-1951.

First published as The Bulletin in 1880, this newspaper has undergone numerous title changes.

This collection brings together all the variant titles of the Edmonton Bulletin allowing for seamless searching across the years.

• The Bulletin (1880-1881): 25 digitized issues.
• Edmonton Bulletin (1881-1902): 1,647 digitized issues, transitioning from weekly to semi-weekly.
• Daily Edmonton Bulletin (1903-1906): 905 digitized issues, published daily except Sunday.
• Edmonton Daily Bulletin (1906-1907): 354 digitized issues.
• The Edmonton Bulletin (1907): 15 digitized issues.
• The Edmonton Daily Bulletin (1907-1915): 2,675 digitized issues, often with special editions.
• The Morning Bulletin (1915-1924): 2,522 digitized issues.
• The Edmonton Bulletin (1924-1951): Digitized issues continuing daily publication until 1951.

Historical newspaper collections are a great resource for Alberta historians and journalists interested in the evolution of historical newspapers. And, of course, for anyone interested in local history!

More detailed information about individual titles within this collection, including specific numbering irregularities and suspensions, is available on the Peel’s Prairie Provinces newspaper page. More historic Edmonton newspapers are linked from the library’s Newpapers guide.

On October 6, 2025, William C. Wonders Map Collection staff uploaded our 3000^th map to Internet Archive (IA). The 1912 plan showing survey of Old Trail being part of Old Trail from Saddle Lake to Lac la Biche, in classic ozalid, and a 20 footer¹ covering a distance over 100 kilometers. It has now become the longest map we have scanned.²

Since 2021 the collection of maps on IA has been growing. Relying on intermittent Digitization staff and student hours, SLIS and MacEwan practicums, and the initial core work of the Metadata Strategies team in creating a spreadsheet that aligns the map collection database³ with IA metadata structures. To all these individuals we owe a great deal of gratitude!

Many of the maps uploaded are a result of reference questions from across North America⁴ with IA providing fast turnarounds for sharing maps. Allowing researchers, and the general public, to quickly download the scanned images.

Figure 1. Shows the scanning of the plan showing survey of Old Trail being part of Old Trail from Saddle Lake to Lac la Biche alongside the nested-collections mentioned below and includes a screen capture of recently added maps.

There are also many fascinating nested-collections including Peel’s Prairie Provinces – Map Collection which was harvested from its original server location, hosted by the University of Alberta Library. The Horvath Collection of maps that are part of the J. Eugene Horvath Collection of Hungarica.⁵ If you enjoy historical Alberta Highway Maps, the collection goes back to the 1920s.⁶ The vibrant Chrysant & Leslie Dmytruk and Orest & Olesia Talpash Collection of Ukraine & Eastern Europe maps that were donated to Bruce Peel Special Collections have also been added. As these unique maps were processed for IA, map staff researched each individual map item to enhance their descriptions.⁷

There is a collection of Canada’s National Parks maps that have an associated Indigenous Peoples & Canada’s National Parks LibGuide. This project is part of ongoing work to decolonize the William C. Wonders Map Collection. In this case, through awareness that the Indigenous peoples experience and the creation of Canada’s National Park system was/is a continuation of settler colonialism.

Curious about our most viewed IA map? Interestingly it is Karta vashneishikh mestorozhdenii polynikh iskopaemikh Aziatskoi Rossii a 1924 map of important mineral deposits in the Asian-Russian region.

We encourage you to share the collection within your networks, update your LibGuides, and contact us at data@ualberta.ca with any questions and/or suggestions for maps you would like to see added to the William C. Wonders Map Collection on Internet Archive. If you are on Bluesky we post when new maps are added to IA, along with other cartographic and GIS news.

You may be familiar with the Informit Indigenous Collection, an important database centring on (but not limited to) Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Pacific regions.

Now, we also have access to the other nine (9) full-text collections that, together, are known as the Informit Core Collection. This new access is due to a technical reconfiguration on the part of Informit. They no longer restrict subscriptions to just one collection (ie. the Indigenous Collection), so for now, they have granted subscribers gratis access to their entire database, ten (10) collections in total.

These collections are wide-ranging and touch on education, law, humanities and social sciences, business and finance, engineering, child development and social work, health, literature, and culture.

The asset for the Informit Indigenous Collection remains. We’ve also added an asset for the Informit Core Collection. Within Informit Core, it’s very easy to select specific collections — from the database landing page, just click “View All Databases.” We will not be adding additional Informit assets.

We’ll have access to Informit Core Collection for about two years, at which time we will assess whether it’s been relevant for the campus community.

A top publisher of computing research, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), is transitioning all of its publications to Open Access, an initiative it calls ACM Open. Sustained national advocacy and consortial negotiations have resulted in an agreement to support ACM Open, which UAL has now joined. This agreement gives U of A corresponding authors APC-free Open Access publishing in all ACM journals, magazines, and conference and workshop proceedings.

CSU will send out a brief announcement soon via the Academics Digest email. In the meantime, feel free to raise awareness of this new agreement in your areas, as you see fit.

We’ve added the ACM publications (n=80) to the SciFree Journal Search Tool, and, thanks to Natasha Nunn, ACM is now listed on the APC Support Page.