Library History Today Blog

School Library Development in Postwar Canada, 1945–50 Attention to school library work and better cooperation between public libraries and schools increased after the Second World War. While many libraries in secondary schools were satisfactory and there were a few outstanding ones, small classroom collections prevailed in elementary schools. For example, at a rural school in Brechin just outside Nanaimo, British Columbia, each classroom featured a small library with books supplied by the Vancouver Island Union Library. Teachers frequently were in charge of these collections, although a few trained teacher-librarians supervised activities in some places. Larger public libraries, such as Toronto and Vancouver, led the way in providing collections for schools to use and promoted their services in children’s libraries or special rooms for teenagers. In the case of Vancouver, elementary schools could borrow recreational books to augment their own collections from a central collection in th...

Canadian librarianship was formed incrementally and was loosely structured in the first half of the twentieth century when it emerged as a modern professional career. The practice of Librarianship coalesced around the broader field of an emerging academic discipline, library science, an expanding range of professional specialties (e.g., children’s librarianship or special library work), increasingly technical aspects related to acquiring and organizing different types of resources, and offering readers and clients assistance and information. For the most part, librarians in various settings sought to develop an intermediary role between their clientele and the world of print. They did so when library science evolved as a university-based discipline grounded in the knowledge and techniques of collecting, organizing, and managing records for public use. In 2019, I examined three significant issues on this topic in an article From Library Work to Library Science in Partnership: The Can...

There is general agreement that librarianship is a profession (or semi-profession), distinct from an occupation. Throughout the 20th century, librarians have shifted from the 19th-century primacy of custodianship to an active service ethic, where librarians became active intermediaries between their resources and the public. Over this time, librarianship has constructed ideas about its diverse character in Britain, the United States, and Canada. For five decades until 1975, librarians in the province of Ontario sought to emulate the popular ‘trait model’ of professionalism to institutionalize legal recognition and to secure advanced social status. I believe these attempts to achieve a distinctive professional status may be characterized as a ‘professional project,’ the process whereby an occupation seeks to institutionalize legal recognition and improve its social standing. The Trait Theory and Professionalism The trait theory comprises common characteristics that Ontario librarians fe...