Digital exhibition sites represent thematic curated selections of digitized items from the ɬÀï·¬ holdings.
Current digital exhibitions
Missing voices: South Asian perspectives on the Gwillim archives
This exhibition pairs the examination of a colonial archive of letters and watercolours created by two English sisters, Elizabeth Gwillim and Mary Symonds, who lived in Madras (Chennai) at the beginning of the 19th century, with a series of contemporary podcasts that engage with people from the South Asian community in Canada today who are looking at their own pasts and creating their own archives.
ɬÀï·¬iana: 200 years of student life
Objects, photographs and ephemera offer us fragments and glimpses of life in another time, showing us details of a larger picture. Each item in this exhibition is part of one or many stories about the people who made the items, the people who used them and those who chose to keep them. They speak to a larger narrative about the changing experience of being a student at ɬÀï·¬ throughout its 200-year history.
Undescrib’d: Taylor White’s 18th-century paper museum
This exhibition showcases the research conducted by the SSHRC-funded Taylor White Project team into the life, network, and legacy of Taylor White and his ‘paper museum.’ It also provides a browsable gallery of the 938 watercolour paintings of animals commissioned by Taylor White in the mid-18th century.
The Fur Trade and the North West Company
This exhibit introduces the North West Company papers that are now full-text searchable as part of a handwritten text recognition software pilot. These collections include records that document the finance, accounting, and administration of the North West Company, and illuminate the kinship networks that solidified wealth and political power amongst its senior management and major shareholders.
Food riddles and riddling ways
An online exhibition focusing on the intersections of culinary and riddling practices, primarily in the United Kingdom and North America. We showcase many different dinner-time riddling events and provide digitized versions of beautiful manuscripts and riddle-related items housed in Rare Books and Special Collections.
Virtual ɬÀï·¬
This website contains images of ɬÀ﷬’s campus buildings and describes the programs they house(d). Browse aerial photographs and images of models of buildings, both built and unbuilt.
Archived digital exhibitions
Legacy digital exhibitions are archived according to the Libraries' web archiving policy. Search functionality will be limited on web archived sites, and these sites may not meet modern web standards.
Art deco and the decorative arts in the 1920s and 1930s
This exhibition pays homage to Art Deco on the occasion of the 10th World Congress that was held in Montreal in 2009. Discover over 150 examples of Art Deco design in various formats and styles including ephemera, popular magazines, book-bindings, typography and advertisements.
Telling stories: Nursery rhymes, fables and fairy tales from the Sheila R. Bourke collection
The Sheila R. Bourke Collection of Children's Books is a representative collection of early and modern children's literature, written and illustrated by prominent creators and spanning five centuries. This exhibition features 87 fine examples of books, nursery rhymes, Aesop's fables and fairy tales.
Interpersonal Botany: Intersections between people, print and botany 1700-1900
This exhibition puts on display a variety of materials including books, periodicals, letters and friendship albums. The 28 rare items offer a view of the diverse social dimensions of botanical printed matter, suggesting they served as ways of creating community, forming bonds, and sharing information.
Tower of Babel or universal understanding? The art of translation in the eighteenth century
This exhibition showcases over 80 works of translation from the 18th century, following the themes of literature, women as translators, the tools of translation, architecture and art, science and exploration, religion, and politics.
A garment worker's legacy: The Joe Fishstein collection of Yiddish poetry
A companion to the printed catalogue of the same name published in the Fontanus monograph series, this site includes an online catalogue and virtual exhibition with over 300 diverse digitized selections from the Fishstein Collection, one of the most important private collections of Yiddish poetry.
The birdman of ɬÀï·¬: Casey Wood
Explore 119 drawings, manuscripts, photographs and publications by and about Dr. Casey Wood whose research into diseases of the eye led him to ophthalmology, the study of the eyesight of birds and fueled his interest in birds themselves as well as his passion for building one of North America's greatest rare book collections dedicated to ornithology and zoology.
Champlain revisited: Celebrating the foundation of Quebec
This exhibition celebrates the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec City in 1608 by Samuel de Champlain. The selection of 80 items include Champlain’s original published voyages and other documents offering valuable iconographic and cartographic information about early New France.
The calendar and the cloister: Oxford - St. John's College MS17
The medieval manuscript, MS Oxford, St. John's College 17, is a collection of texts and extracts from texts on mathematics, astronomy, time, calendar, writing systems, medicine and the natural world, illustrated with tables and diagrams. Explore the original full-text and a transcription.
Women, work, and song in nineteenth-century France
Explores both women’s work and the cultural work about women in the popular song industry, drawing on a selection of pieces from the 19th-Century French Sheet Music Collection.
Islamic calligraphy
Explore the history of Arabic/Islamic calligraphy, from dry black and white calligraphy of the 10th century to colorful illuminated pieces of the 19th century in this exhibition of 113 albums, panels and isolated leaves representing various styles of Arabic calligraphy.
People in the world of print
This exhibition examines how people interacted with print between 1700 and 1900.The six sections of the exhibition explore different types of print matter and those social groups that interacted with the material, featuring 40 digital objects, including monographs, photographs and playing cards.
Habitat '67: Revisited
The Habitat website includes comprehensive sketches, plans, elevations, sections, working drawings, structural details, photographs, a three-dimensional modelling of Habitat '67 as well as interviews and case studies featuring first and second generation Habitat residents.
Cultural practices of intermediality
This exhibition explores the emergence of the increasingly widespread media ecology in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The 30 print items included in the exhibition were selected for their sometimes explicit, and frequently implicit engagement with other media.
Moravian beginnings of Canadian Inuit literature
Browse maps, photographs, books, periodicals and other objects from the 19th century to contemporary Canadian Inuit writings. The 92 items displayed in this exhibition include selections from the Lawrence Lande Collection of Canadiana, The Lande Eskimo Collection and The Lande Arkin Collection.
Celebrating the Winter Olympics 1924-2006
To commemorate the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games, this exhibition presents a short history of Canadians’ participation at the Winter Olympics from 1924 to 2006. Browse over 60 unusual items from ɬÀï·¬ Library’s Olympic Collections.
La modernité et ses platitudes: James Gillray and his contemporaries
This exhibition focuses on works by the London engraver, James Gillray, who, with his colleagues Thomas Rowlandson and Isaac Cruikshank, were pioneers of visual satire. Browse 86 items in this unique collection of British and Napoleonic era caricatures.
Interactions of script and print in the nineteenth century
This exhibition uses manuscript and printed texts to survey a nineteenth-century media ecology in which script and print fed off each other in unexpected ways, generating new cultural possibilities through their mutual interactions.
Pulling strings: The Rosalynde Stearn puppet collection
This exhibition showcases over 100 items from the Canadian puppeteer Rosalynde Osborne Stearn’s puppet collection held in the Library. The collection is a comprehensive library on the puppet theatre that includes representative examples of puppets characteristic of different periods and countries.
Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
This exhibition celebrates 1000 years since the inception of The Shahnameh by Ferdowsi. It features 16 specimens of one of the foremost literary works encapsulating the breadth and depth of Iran's historical trajectory.
The Max Stern virtual exhibition
Canadian philanthropist Dr. Max Stern’s book collection approximates 2,000 items and was bequeathed to Concordia, ɬÀï·¬, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This website includes a virtual exhibition, contextual information and a searchable database of the items catalogued.
Tuberculosis: The enduring enemy
Site exhibiting the Osler Library's holdings of monographs and pamphlets related to the subject of tuberculosis. Includes full-text access to several books and bibliographic records for many more.
Writing in company: Forms of collaboration in artistic works and scientific knowledge 1700-1914
This exhibition features over 50 examples of collaboration among writers associated with the rise of popular literature, writers and illustrators or composers, creators and interpreters as well as written collaborations between members of salons, artistic movements, religious orders, academic institutions or scientific expeditions.
Yesterday and today: Children's books of the early Soviet era
This exhibition features a curated selection of 64 books from the Rare Book Division's collection of Soviet children's books, a collection that is representative of the changing social landscape in the 1920s and the 1930s era Soviet Union.
Our friend, the sun: Images of light therapeutics from the Osler Library Collection
This exhibition delves into the visual culture of Heliotherapy, an ancient practice of total bodily exposure to sunlight, and Phototherapy, an electric light therapy pioneered in the 1890s. Browse 43 illustrated texts, photographs and objects.
The Western encounter with China, 1600-1900
This exhibition features 42 items and contextual text chronicling early Jesuit accounts of Chinese Chinese civilization and examining the influence of Confucianism on scholars of the Enlightenment.