Library History Today Blog

Before the Second World War, there was only one standalone university library building in the Canadian west. The University of British Columbia library opened in 1925 on the Point Grey campus in Vancouver under the direction of John Ridington. However, with the post-1945 increase in student numbers, which included returning war veterans, overcrowding in three Prairie universities led to development plans that included the transfer and consolidation of library collections from various academic buildings into a separate, central library structure. University collections had grown incrementally across each campus, and at mid-century, Manitoba held almost 250,000 volumes, Saskatchewan about 125,000, and Alberta almost 150,000. These were relatively large holdings in a Canadian context and were comparable to academic libraries of a similar size in Ontario, such as Queen’s or Western, which had erected buildings in the interwar years, the Douglas (1924) and Lawson (1934) libraries. With the ...

Marion Gilroy, BA portrait, 1932 Marion Gilroy began a promising academic career at the Public Archives of Nova Scotia during the 1930s. With the benefit of a Carnegie Fellowship award for a proposed study of adult education in the Halifax area in 1938, she earned a library degree at Columbia University. Then she returned to her native province to assume the task of directing the War Services Libraries in the Atlantic Defence Area for the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Merchant Marine. After the end of the Second World War, in 1946, she became the supervisor of regional public libraries in Saskatchewan with the responsibility of promoting them across extensive rural areas populated by small towns and rural farms. Her initial energy and enthusiasm led to the creation of the North Central Regional Library in the Prince Albert-Melfort area in 1950. Through the fifties, Gilroy helped North Central develop as a model aided by the establishment of a Provincial Library in 1953 to expand extensio...