Yesterday, the archives participated in a Twitter event hosted by @AskArchivists. Using Valentine's Day as a lens in which to interpret our holdings, archives across the globe tweeted about their holdings.
For more information about the #loveheritage event, see Ask Archivists' blog here.
For our primary post for Valentine's Day, see our feature on love songs from [...]
News
Valentine's Day: sugary sweet pop songs from the 1910s
In recognition of the high-sucrose holiday of St. Valentine's Day, here are a selection of some of the more fluffy pieces of sheet music from the John Arpin Sheet Music Collection.
All Alone: a tenacious telephone technology tune
All Alone, "Harry Von Tizler's Great Telephone Song" features a lonely Marie having difficulty contacting her fella Georgie to [...]
Black History Month featured fonds: Obsidian Theatre Company
Founded in February 2000, Obsidian Theatre Company is a leading black theatre companies in Canada. As a producer of black theatre and community advocate, the company has endeavoured to produce plays, develop playwrights and train emerging theatre professionals. Their mission statement focuses on the exploration, development, and production of the black voice.
The founding board included [...]
In Memorium: Rabbi Gunther Plaut (1 November 1912 - 8 February 2012)
Rabbi Wolf Gunther Plaut was a Reform rabbi and author. An important figure in the history of the Jewish community in Toronto, he served as rabbi of Holy Blossom Temple from 1961 to 1977 and later as a Rabbi Emeritus and Senior Scholar of the temple.
Born in Germany, Plaut fled persecution under the Nazis in [...]
Hitting milestone with the John Arpin Sheet Music Collection: 1000 down, 139,000 more to go!
Today was an exciting milestone for two of our student assistants working on inventorying sheet music from the John Arpin Archives. In collaboration with librarians and staff from Bibliographic Services, the 1000th piece of sheet music was entered into the cataloguing system. It won't appear for another few weeks in the online catalogue, but we [...]
Recent Acquisition: Speculations of the Uses of Sewage
Here is a recent aquisition to York University's Special Collections: a pamphlet from 1847 proposing various strategies of dealing with, ahem, night soil in cities.
This pamphlet may be of interest to students studying city planning, environmental studies, water quality, public health, sanitation, and the living conditions of the working class in nineteenth century England.
The pamphlet [...]

