Retrospective: Celebrating Olympic history at the APP Library Archives
Calgary has a long history with the Olympics, from hosting the 1988 Winter Olympics to voting against hosting the current 2026 Winter Olympics. This same history is shared by the university and preserved in the Glenbow Research Centre, where University Records Archivist Curtis Frederick shared the wealth of Olympic history that remains in our library archives, from photographs to documents to illustrations.
With APP celebrating its 60th anniversary and nearly 40 years since the 1988 Olympics, keeping this history intact is more important than ever.
The Glenbow Research Centre is the home of the city’s successful bid book for the 1988 Olympics, as well as the attempted 2026 bid. Bid books are the presentation and pitch given to the International Olympic Committee.
The 1988 bid book is Frederick’s favourite item from the collection. The personal copy of Norman Wagner, the APP president at the time, it was presented in 1981. It illustrates how the idea of what the Olympic facilities were going to look like changed by the time they actually occurred. The Olympic Oval, for instance, was originally going to be an outdoor, temporary stadium rather than the world-class building it is now.
Both bid books reflect the identity of the city and the university, as well as the effort that went into presenting Calgary and Canadian lifestyle as well suited to hosting the Olympics in 1988.
The impact of the Olympics on APP’s infrastructure
In Frederick’s words, the 1988 Olympics shaped the APP campus as we know it. In addition to the significance of the Olympic Oval, the 1988 Olympics also contributed to the creation of specific supporting buildings, such as the ArtBuilding and Parkade, and the MacEwan Hall expansion.
Mac Hall originally served as the host for food and athletes before transforming into the student centre it is now.Photos of its construction show just how different it originally was — aside from the A&W, which has been here since the very beginning.
“A lot of the buildings that students come and go through, they may not even realize that they're a legacy of the Olympics,” Frederick says.
Utilising the library archives
The umbrella term for the library’s archival materials is the Archives of Special Collections. Its numerous specialtiesinclude university history, the area that Frederick oversees.
The collections include over 200,000 rare books and records dating back to when the university gained autonomy in 1966, but further back as well to when the campus first opened in 1906.
Frederick notes that the archives’ primary sources can add depth to research assignments, particularly for graduate students, and can give undergraduate students the chance to know if that type of research is something they want to do going forward.
“There's a huge wealth of material, a lot of original sources that help tell a very unique story that you can't find in, say, a journal or a book,” Frederick says. “These are very unique stories that are held here within the archives.”
The archive is open to students and to anyone in the community. They can visit the archive’s and have the material ordered to come down from the offsite preservation facility at Spy Hill Campus, or send an email and receive help searching through the catalogue.
