Library History Today Blog

Henry Pearson Gundy was a prominent scholar-librarian who made important contributions to Canadian literature, printing, and publishing as well as library services. After commencing his career in 1931 at the new campus of McMaster University in Hamilton, Gundy taught for a short time at the University of Chicago before becoming an English professor and eventually head of the English Department at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. Then, towards the end of WW II, Gundy's career track changed after he completed a summer course in library studies at Columbia University, a prestigious library school many Canadians attended to further their careers. In 1947, he was appointed chief librarian of Queen's University, succeeding the retiring incumbent, E. C. Kyte. Under his leadership for almost two decades the Queen's library expanded its services, staffing, and collections, notably the Lorne Pierce collection of Canadiana. By the time he relinquished his office, in 1966, th...

The Town of York was founded in 1793 by Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe as the capital of Upper Canada. York replaced Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake), the capital from 1791-93. The town was an established frontier trading site with indigenous people and possessed a good harbour for transport and farmland that attracted settlers. About 1,000 people—settlers, traders, officials, and soldiers—populated the settlement in 1800. With increasing growth over the next quarter century, York became the centre of Ontario government, business, and cultural life. It was renamed Toronto in 1830 in recognition of its indigenous roots and incorporated as a small city in 1834 with a population of about 9,000. Books and the value of literacy in a colonial setting were important elements in cultural life that were fostered by the Upper Canadian elite—Loyalists, government and church officials, wealthy merchants and investors, and emerging career professionals such as lawyers and doctors. Jointly, th...

Canada was a pioneer in the development of radio. As early as May 1920, the Montreal station XWA (later CFCF) went on the air delivering a short concert broadcast to an audience as far away as Ottawa. Listeners initially utilized crystal sets, simple radio receivers. Eventually, these devices were superseded by many types of vacuum tube receivers that became standard for consumers to purchase as less expensive tabletop models by the 1930s. Even so, Canadian audiences were limited in scope to major cities before the electrification of rural areas.For most of the 1920s, there were few Canadian stations and radio enthusiasts along the southern border, especially in Ontario, who often listened to American stations, such as KDKA in Pittsburgh, which began operating at the end of 1920. This station offered library storytelling for children, such as popular short fairy tales and animal stories. The Golden Age of Radio and Libraries In 2008, at the Ontario Library Association Super Conferen...

Nos bibliothèques publiques , by Georges-Émile Marquis. Québec: Éditions du Terroir, 1925, 16 p., illus. Plaidoyer pour les bibliothèques publiques , by Georges-Émile Marquis. Montréal: L’Oeuvre des tracts, 1946, 16 p. G-É Marquis, c.1930s In 1890, the government of Quebec passed a statute, the Municipal Aid to Public Libraries (Chapter 34), authorizing municipalities to approve bylaws to “aid, in conformity with the laws governing them, the establishment and maintenance of free public libraries in their municipalities or in adjoining municipalities.” This law also stipulated similar permissive assistance for library associations and mechanics’ institutes. The city of Westmount, on the island of Montreal, was the first to create a municipal library under this statute in 1899. Yet, the vast majority of communities in Quebec continued to be served by bibliothèques paroissiales , that is, small local collections created and managed by the Catholic Church for use by parishioners sin...

The ‘Library Faith’ in Books, Reading, and Democracy A longstanding belief in the positive influence of the public library in 20th-century North American librarianship was encapsulated in the short term, ‘the library faith,’ a visionary construct best articulated in an examination of public library service commissioned by the American Library Association (ALA), the Public Library Inquiry, which published its research from 1947 to 1952. The Inquiry developed this descriptive model of prevailing beliefs guiding the evolution of public libraries to understand and interpret the past in a structured way. Modelling can be helpful in identifying central ideas, beliefs, and opinions during an era when a prevailing consensus exists within a conceptual framework. The extensive Inquiry study noted that librarians, indeed, many educators and political leaders, believed in the beneficent power of books and reading. Reading was regarded as a crucial element in personal growth and full citizenship. I...