About this Exhibit
We invite you to enter the life of a great Canadian. Explore the Rocky Mountains of Alberta and British Columbia, take a trip around the world in 1914, row the choppy Atlantic off the coast of Labrador, experience a shipwreck in Arctic Norway, and see for yourself evidence of the great ice ages in Canada.
A.P. Coleman: Geologist, Explorer (1852 – 1939) – Science, Art & Discovery presents an interactive website of diaries and notebooks, watercolours, sketches, manuscripts, journal articles, pamphlets, speeches, correspondence, maps, photographs, and newspaper clippings drawn from the Coleman Collection, Victoria University Library, Toronto.
There is much of visual interest in the archive, for Coleman was an excellent amateur painter and he left behind an extensive collection of paintings and drawings that record his travels and explorations from the 1860s through the 1930s. The exhibit draws on the 1994 Coleman exhibition curated by Lila M. Laakso and Raymond K. Laakso. David P. Silcox’s note on the art of A.P. Coleman has been reproduced from the 1994 catalogue for the section on Coleman ‘the Artist’.
This virtual exhibit was created in association with The Royal Ontario Museum. The exhibit includes images of Canadian surveying and scientific instruments from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as rocks and minerals drawn from the collections of the Museum’s Department of Natural History. Many of the rock and mineral specimens were collected or purchased by Coleman in his position as first Director of the Royal Ontario Museum of Mineralogy. Photographs from the ROM Library’s A. P. Coleman Archive bring to life Coleman’s field sites and the exotic locales he visited on his travels throughout Canada and around the world.
All materials in the Victoria University Library’s A.P. Coleman Collection are listed in a finding aid on the library’s website. http://library.vicu.utoronto.ca/collections/special_collections/f7_arthur_p_coleman
The A. P. Coleman website is best viewed using Mozilla Firefox 3 (PC and Mac) and Internet Explorer 7 (PC).
The project has received funding from the Canadian Council of Archives, Archival Community Digitization Project.
Coming Soon
The digital collection of Coleman materials of over 2,500 images. A searchable database with an online catalogue is currently under development. Educational resources offering teachers purposive strategies to encourage students to engage with archive will soon be available on the Web site.
