Identity area
Reference code
Title
Date(s)
- 1977-2008, 2024 (Creation)
Level of description
Fonds
Extent and medium
0.13m of textual records
5 MB of digital records (4 .xlsx files)
Context area
Name of creator
Administrative history
The Plant Development Workshops were forty-two workshops organized from 1977 to 2008, taking place at Universities of Toronto, Guelph, Western, McMaster, Waterloo, Laurier, Trent, Carlton, and Jardin botanique de Montreal. Of these, ten were hosted at the University of Toronto, with five faculty members from the Department of Botany serving as individual hosts over the years (M. Campbell, N. Dengler, R. Dengler, T. Dickinson, D. Riggs). Although the Workshops were informal in nature, they were financially supported by the Department of Botany with a small budget to print programs, bring in international speakers, and to offer refreshments.
The Workshops were designed to bring together plant biologists from across southern Ontario with common research and teaching interests in plant development and related fields (plant structure and function, plant genetics, reproductive biology, evolutionary biology, ecology and systematics). At the same time, the Workshops were important for developing intra-departmental collegiality as undergraduate, graduate, post-doctoral fellows, and faculty from a number of other labs in the Department of Botany (e.g., S. Barrett, T. Berleth, D. Goring, P. McCourt, T. Sage) actively participated in the workshops held at the University of Toronto (St. George and Scarborough campuses, Royal Ontario Museum). The Workshops helped promote social cohesion at UofT's Department of Botany, and served to promote connections among colleagues all working on plants, but from very diverse perspectives.
Alongside these broad professional benefits, the Workshops provided a pivotal educational opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students. Most importantly, they gave undergraduate research students and beginning graduate students opportunities to present their work as posters or oral presentations to an interested and supportive audience before taking it on to national or international meetings. The Workshops provided a broader context for individual research projects and almost always resulted in broader questioning and lively discussion from the diverse audiences. They also gave undergraduates contemplating graduate studies an opportunity to connect directly with grad students from their own and other universities about specific research subject areas, labs, and academic life.
Original text written by Nancy Dengler
Additional information on the workshops can be found in the December 2024 issue of the Canadian Botanical Association Bulletin, "The Southern Ontario-Based Plant Development Workshop
A Retrospective of 31 Years (1977-2008)".
Archival history
Immediate source of acquisition or transfer
Content and structure area
Scope and content
Fonds consists of physical programmes documenting 32 years of the Plant Development Workshop, alongside four excel sheets capturing each contributor, title of the presentation or poster, and the affiliated department and institution.
Appraisal, destruction and scheduling
Accruals
System of arrangement
Files are arranged chronologically.
Conditions of access and use area
Conditions governing access
Open
Conditions governing reproduction
Language of material
- English
Script of material
Language and script notes
Physical characteristics and technical requirements
To request digital metadata files, please contact UTARMS' reference service.
Finding aids
Allied materials area
Existence and location of originals
Existence and location of copies
Related units of description
Notes area
Note
This collection of programs was curated and digitized by Nancy Dengler (U. of Toronto Professor Emerita) and Timothy Dickinson (Royal Ontario Museum Senior Curator Emeritus, U. of T. Adjunct Professor), both prior (co-) organizers of the Toronto-based Plant Development Workshops. The workshop programs and correspondence were sorted, and the programs were scanned to .pdf files at the ROM using a Xerox multifunction printer. Text files of the program contents were then made using the MS Windows version of ABBYY FineReader (v.16), a program for capturing text from digital images. These text files were then edited into a tab-delimited format suitable for import into a spreadsheet. Data for the individual workshops were edited into a consistent arrangement of fields identifying each presentation with one of the 42 workshops, its date, location and organizer, presentation type (Contributed, Invited, Poster, Discussion, etc.), title, authors, and their institutional affiliations. Commercial sponsorship information was not captured in the database, but is available in the individual programs and their scans. For some of the early workshops the archive includes some organizational correspondence. Some individual workshop spreadsheets also include plain text describing discussions or other information of note.