James Albers, silly boy, you’ve been daydreaming again (detail), 2023. Float-mounted 36 x 24 in. inkjet print by Simone Chnarakis, sheer curtain, and curtain rod. Installation photo © Dennis Ha. Reproduced with permission of the artists
UJAH: The Undergraduate Journal of Art History and Visual Culture was founded in 2010 as an online publication hosted on a standalone website. The journal, now in its 17th issue, evolved over the years, with the expansion to print editions with issue 6 and the inclusion of exhibition reviews and artist profiles.
This fall, a dedicated team completed a long-anticipated milestone: migrating UJAH from its standalone website—increasingly unwieldy for hosting and accessing back issues—to UBC Library’s Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform. Now, all UJAH essays, reviews, and artist profiles are fully searchable and globally discoverable through the UBC Library system. The journal will receive ISSNs for its print and online editions, and its production workflow now includes abstracts, keywords, and standardized metadata, further professionalizing UJAH’s scholarly mandate.
Through this migration, UJAH joins a distinguished group of journals on the OJS platform, including BC Studies, Canadian Literature, Cinephile, Slow Mode Journal, and Wreck.
The migration was a substantial archival effort, involving the collation of content from multiple backups and platforms, the reconstruction of articles from partial files and screenshots, and—in a few cases—archival forensics to restore missing material.
The migration team included Curator of Collections Yasmin Amaratunga, Curatorial Assistant Brandon Leung, Undergraduate Advisor Greg Gibson, AHVA Work Learn student Felix Rowe (also an Art History Diploma student, UJAH editor, and UJAH author), and Scholarly Communications Librarian Stephanie Savage (also an AHVA alum!).
