Collections News

The Library has cancelled its subscription to the the Eureka aggregator database, where we were able to find many Quebecois newspapers, and international serials. Many of these titles remain available in other databases such as PressReader and CBCA, but some loss of access may be felt as a result of this cancellation.

If there is any loss of access to high-priority resources resulting from this cancellation, please inform the CSU team via the Subscription or Large Purchase Suggestion Form.

Over the past six months, we’ve added 353 items to the Government of Alberta Publications Collection, and new material is being added every day. New uploads touch on topics such as post-secondary education, northern economic development, consumer price indexes, automobile emissions, and housing incentive programs — providing researchers with valuable primary-source documentation of Alberta’s social, economic, environmental, and governmental priorities, mostly from the 1970s and 80s.

Background: This collection is a partnership with the Alberta Legislature Library. Everything in our collection is then also added to the larger Canadian Government Publications Portal, a collaborative, cross-institutional effort to make Canadian government documents freely searchable online.

Collection scope and content: The collection’s strength lies in administrative and regulatory documentation, the kind of primary-source grey literature that’s often hard to track down elsewhere. Some examples of major themes include:

• Energy and natural resources: proceedings, orders, and reports from the Energy Resources Conservation Board and its successors, plus extensive material on natural gas, petroleum, and coal regulation — including long multi-volume inquiry records (e.g., the 1944–46 Natural Gas Utilities Act enquiry into Turner Valley, spanning 93 volumes) 
• Education testing records: provincial examinations, diploma exams, and matriculation board materials from Alberta Education and its Student Evaluation Branch. This includes a run of standardized testing artifacts, concentrated mainly in the 1980s–2000s.
• Statistics and public finance: Bureau of Statistics and Treasury Department periodicals and annual series.

Who might benefit from this collection? Researchers in Alberta/Canadian provincial political history, energy and natural resource policy history (especially natural gas/petroleum regulation), education policy and the history of standardized testing, public administration, and social policy history relying on primary government documents and grey literature — particularly those with a research window in the 1970s–2000s.

Not sure if there would be relevant information? Encourage researchers to search the collection’s full text (“text contents” option shown below) by keyword and explore what is available, using the filters on the left.

Report of the University Librarian 

42 volumes dating from 1925 to the late 1980s. These volumes cover administrative, statistical, and historical data on the library’s operations, such as visitor numbers, collection expenditures, and staffing changes. 

News from the Rare Book Room

An occasional publication of the Special Collections Unit (now Bruce Peel Special Collections), it highlights new acquisitions and notes on ‘unique or unusual materials’. Published irregularly, we have 18 volumes published between 1964 and 1980.

Hello everyone,

For two of our large subscription ebook packages, books are added throughout the year (and their accompanying records are added to the catalogue), but removals happen only twice each year. This is an update on removals that will occur in June and July 2026. Lists of removed ebooks are attached to this post.

Please note that this is routine collection maintenance. This maintenance is not related to budget cuts.

ProQuest Academic Complete
ProQuest will remove 37,256 ebooks from the ProQuest Academic Complete ebook subscription package. Usage data illustrate that 3% (n=1,104) of removed titles had seen use at the U of A in the past 24 months.

EBSCO Academic North America
EBSCO will remove 3,798 ebooks from the EBSCO Academic NA ebook subscription package. Usage data illustrate that 6.3% (n=241) of the removed titles had seen use at the U of A in the past 12 months.

In the CSU, we’ve taken steps to prevent loss of access to ebooks that have seen some use. We already have several of the most-used books on other platforms (e.g., OVID, Taylor & Francis, JSTOR), and have placed orders for the remaining titles.

If you have questions or concerns about these changes, please email csu@ualberta.ca.

One of the most common digitization requests we get from local community groups is to digitze their local newspapers. Digitizing local small-town newspapers preserves fragile records of everyday life—births, events, and community stories—that might otherwise be lost to time. These most recent additions have all been in collaboration with local history groups or the publishers themselves.

To expand the Alberta Community Newspaper digitization project, we have partnered with the Alberta Legislative Library and borrowed over +200 rolls of microfilm copies of additional titles. Watch for those going online this summer.