Send us:

• The latest copy of your curriculum vitae
• Diaries, memoirs, or personal reminiscences
• General biographical articles that describe you or your work

Don’t send us:

• Old curriculum vitae (unless they include information missing from later versions)
• Curriculum vitae updates or drafts

Send us:

• If you won an award, include the records about it.
• If you have a significant community achievement (e.g., grandmaster in chess) include documentation about your accomplishment.

Don’t send us:

• Routine notices of promotions or merit increases or correspondence concerning the same.

Send us:

• Include any correspondence that represents significant turning points in your career.
• Family letters may illuminate your personality or interests and form a useful complement to your other papers.

Don’t send us:

• Insignificant personal correspondence such as ephemeral personal emails or holiday cards.

Send us:

• Lecture notes that illustrate what was taught at a particular point in time (biology of the 1960s, for example).
• Representative exams (master copies with answers—not the exams of a particular student)
• Master copies of assignments or problem sets that illustrate what the student was expected to learn

Why:

• Using such documentation, historical studies have been done to illustrate the growth of various academic disciplines. What is being published may not represent what is being taught in the classroom.
• Exams and lecture notes can show how teaching trends have caused one part of a subject to be stressed over another at different times. For example, in various eras and locations, calculus was taught to emphasize either its theoretical or its practical aspects.
• Exams and lecture notes can also be used to determine whether larger shifts in subject disciplines occurred differently or at an earlier time than suggested by more formal publications.

Don’t send us:

• If your lecture notes are rough scribbles that only serve as loose guidelines to your classroom presentations, the notes may not be intelligible to future researchers.

Send us:

• Correspondence and other documentation about particularly notable graduate students who went on to become distinguished scholars or make significant community contributions in their own right.

Why:

• Illustrates academic lineage and the academic process.

Don’t send us:

• Most student documentation is routine and subject to privacy legislation (requests for grade changes or other administrative measures, routine student papers, most letters of recommendation, routine inquiries about graduate school). Unless they are truly significant, it is not worth the expense of administering access to such material.

Send us:

• Student papers only if very significant.
• Locally-based primary source research is of particular interest.
• UNBC Undergraduate Theses

Why:

• Some significant student research papers represent novel topics and avenues of inquiry.
• UNBC Undergraduate Theses are not collected through official university channels.

Don't send us:

• Routine or insignificant student work.
• Copies of UNBC Theses or Graduate Projects that already exist in UNBC Library holdings. Check our online UNBC Theses and Dissertations.

Send us:

• Carefully selected correspondence that relates to your research areas. This may include such things as responses to your articles or other discussions with professional colleagues.
• Correspondence may consist of any form of written communication, analogue (such as letters) or digital (such as email).

Why:

• Illustrates the research process, scholarly interaction, your personal development as a scholar, and the intellectual spirit of the times.

Don’t send us:

• “Meet me for lunch” type correspondence
• Letters of transmittal ("please find enclosed")
• Orders for books
• Requests for reprints

Send us:

• Files on your major publications (books, extensive monographs) if they contain substantive correspondence with the editor or referees
• Correspondence with other scholars
• Drafts if significantly different from the published version
• One copy of any article that may have been published in an obscure publication not readily available
• Publications by others that have highly significant informational value but may be very difficult to obtain through normal bibliographic channels.
• Very unique or rare books that may be worthy of inclusion in Special Collections, particularly if they are related to Northern/Central British Columbia

Why:

• Illustrates the research process and the history of your discipline.

Don’t send us:

• Your publications which may be found readily in standard published sources.
• Books, which may be donated to the Library (unless appropriate for Special Collections)
• Reprints (yours or others, unless heavily annotated or form an integral part of a significant file (e.g., an article which led you into a particular research direction).
• Drafts which are substantially the same as the finished publication.
• Your reports as a referee on others’ publications unless highly significant. Please provide context of significance.

Send us:

• Data supporting your major research achievements
• Highly significant research data that did not make it into publication (For instance, you may have done extensive audio interviews for a project and only used a portion of the information.)
• The data must be decipherable, intelligible to others, well-organized, and provided with a context. Here is an example of how one research scientist organized his data for a research project and provided context (click on thumbnail image of linked PDF on the page): https://search.nbca.unbc.ca/index.php/2023-2-2-8 

Why:

• Illustrates the research process
• May promote additional research in the field if the unexploited data can be used by other scholars in your discipline.
• May be used by historians of your field.

Don’t send us:

• General notes that you took from reading literature in the field.

Send us:

• Selected grant applications that summarize your work at a particular point in time or represent particularly notable awards for research that proved to be significant.

Why:

• Grant applications may give a summary of a researcher’s best work at a particular point in time. These summaries may be useful for tracing the history of academic disciplines.

Don’t send us:

• Blank forms
• Multiple drafts of grant applications
• Minor or routine grants that you received
• Your adjudication of others’ grant applications unless highly significant

Send us:

• Unpublished speeches or presentations that you made. To provide context, it may be helpful to include a program from the conference or substantive correspondence relating to your presentation.
• Unique or significant scientific field trip documentation (affiliated with a conference or not)

Why:

• This information is not recorded elsewhere.
• Documents your own research and the scholarly process.

Don’t send us:

• Administrative material related to your conference attendance such as airplane tickets, hotel reservations, expense account documentation, travel brochures, routine correspondence (“thank you for agreeing to speak…”)

Send us:

• Correspondence and other documentation if you played a significant historical role such as determining a new policy, or setting a new direction for the organization.

Why:

• Your papers are documenting your role as an academic so your important work in national organizations can be of significance in illustrating the cooperative nature of the scholarly process.

Don’t send us:

• Generally discard bulletins, newsletters, and routine correspondence with national professional and scholarly organizations. We have to assume that each organization is keeping its own basic archival material. Our space is limited. If the scholarly organization is of particular significance to UNBC or Northern/Central British Columbia, please get in touch with an archivist for further guidance.

Send us:

• Were you the chair or recordkeeper of a significant committee? If so, send us the agendas, minutes, and supporting papers.
• Send us committee material if you were a member of a significant committee and you suspect that this documentation is not being maintained elsewhere.
• If the official committee record is being kept elsewhere, did you heavily annotate your copies of the minutes or agendas? If so, keep.
• When in doubt, please check with us.

Don’t send us:

• Board of Governors minutes, unless you were a member or participant and your copy of the minutes/agenda is heavily annotated.
• Senate minutes, unless you were a member or participant and your copy of the minutes/agenda is heavily annotated.

Send us:

• Circulars or bulletins
• University publications that were not widely disseminated
• Pamphlets, brochures, flyers
• Posters
• Other documents and ephemera relating to UNBC history that you may have collected over your career

Don’t send us:

• UNBC academic calendars

Send us:

• Selected correspondence and other records that demonstrate the relation between your scholarship and the community.
• Letters to newspaper or magazine editors
• Records that may have a more tangential relationship to your scholarship but which represent important historical events, or significant community concerns or issues that you feel it is important to document and in which you participated.

Send us:

• Records related to local community groups you chaired or were involved in, especially if that group's records are not kept elsewhere.
• These local community groups do not need to be related to your academic career or areas of research (for example, a cultural association or a hobbyist group).

Don't send us:

• If a community group you were involved with maintains their own recordkeeping, you may wish to discuss the disposition of your related records with them.