What would you do if you had 15 million dollars lying around, and a burning passion for knowledge? Donate it to UBC of course! That was probably what Peter Wall was thinking back in 1991 when he made, at that time, the largest donation that a Canadian university had ever received. The Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies opened its doors and was a thriving research accelerator and knowledge incubator, funding research, lectures, projects, symposiums, events, and more during its 32 years until it closed in 2023.
UBC Campaign News, June 1991
The records produced by the Institute between 1995 and 2023 make up the PWIAS fonds, and now that they are no longer in use, they have been donated to the University Archives. We are very happy to finally announce that the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies fonds has been uploaded to Open Collections! This entire process started in 2009, and at the time the fonds consisted mostly of physical records. Throughout the years accruals (more records!) were received by the University Archives, the finding aid was updated, but the biggest transfer was the digital records acquisition in 2023 after the Institute closed.
In 2024, Jack Dempster, the Records Management Assistant, went through all the records, applying retention schedules and preparing them for temporary digital storage in the UA’s Move-It system. Digital storage is not only expensive but also uses up natural resources, therefore as the University Archives we want to make sure we are only keeping records with archival value and not records that should have been destroyed in the ordinary course of business. Back then folder names were also abbreviated (such as International to Intl) since file paths longer than 256 characters corrupt files, and considering preservation as our goal, everything must be done to prevent future issues.
Over Fall of 2024 we were all hands-on deck on the analysis coming out of our biennial survey (the one that led to the fun and informative blog posts series this year), so the Peter Wall records were stored until I could look at them this summer. During this appraisal process almost 30gb(!) of duplicate and low-value files (brand logos, generic promotional images, unreadable files) were destroyed according to the UBC Retention Schedules. We also made sure that if a folder only had one folder inside that we pulled it up a level, since opening a box only to find another box is frustrating and unproductive. Although some of those records that were deleted had that fate because they were past their retention period and not destined for the University Archives, the majority of files deleted were duplicates! And now, we have finished arranging and describing over 42.000 items, and uploaded all that information into AtoM.
[Above can be seen the full version of Rosalind Picard’s 2013 lecture “Emotional Intelligence in a Brave New Robotic World”, however we’d like to highlight the clip from 4:30 to around 7min]
Inside the fonds, the series range from Annual Reports, Clippings and Publications, Events, Finances, to even Catering. The biggest focus of the collection are the programs developed by PWIAS, such as the Wall Scholars, International Visiting Scholars, Distinguished Professors, and Wall Exchange Lectures, to name a few. A book celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Institute, called “Memory”, is inside the fonds and can also be found online through the UBC Library if you’re curious about the Institute’s history. The book was edited by Philippe Tortell, who was one of the last directors of the PWIAS. Peter Wall, the father of the institute and prominent property developer, passed away this year. UBC made a tribute to him, and more information about his life in Vancouver can be found in this obituary. The University also has a page dedicated to him in the book “A UBC anthology: a tribute to our leading benefactors” (seen below).
Excerpt from “A UBC anthology: a tribute to our leading benefactors”
Regarding the content in the fonds, even though the majority of the records are regarding the programs (over 37.000 files of program-related records), the crown jewels are the hundreds of the podcast episodes, lectures, presentations, and roundtable recordings available inside the fonds which we are overjoyed to be able to provide full access to. It’s always a pleasure to experience experts in their fields talking about subjects they’re passionate. Many of them used to be available on Youtube, so we’re very happy to be able to make them available again. However, we kept the original order the files were stored in by the Institute, and so the content is spread around in different areas (meaning it might take some digging around to find certain things).
The records provide a treasure trove of knowledge regarding a wide variety of topics by renowned professors, researchers and other professionals, and have much to say, from trees talking to one another, to murder mysteries in Sumerian times, to “Bugs R Us”. We are certain that researchers, historians, and enthusiasts will find interesting things here. And if you are listening to an episode and notice we might not have a complete record of the speakers, please reach out, we want to make sure episodes are as accessible as possible. However, even though I mentioned recordings can be found all over the fonds, most of them can be located in the Communications Series (BD-003), with fun things to listen to and watch, including the Ways of Knowing subseries (call number BD-003-009), with episodes inside the MP3 folders and in the Podcast Archive subseries (BD-003-010).
[Above Sara Milstein can be seen telling the story of the first recorded murder trial]
If you are interested in more PWIAS content, cIRcle has thesis, articles, conference papers and even some lecture recordings published by faculty and students available for reading. It’s really exciting to see the results of their hard work and research and the variety of topics is astounding.
Again, we are really happy to finally have the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies fonds in our collection. We hope this wealth of materials is helpful and instructive to researchers and anyone else curious about knowledge and learning.