Canadian Library History Blog

Marie Tremaine, c.1949 Marie Tremaine's work on Canadian bibliography remains unparalleled. According to her obituary, she "personally searched the shelves of some 200 libraries across Canada and the United States to find 1204 monographs and pamphlets" published between 1751 and 1800. Her largest work was the Arctic Bibliography encompassing 16 volumes, 14 of which Tremaine worked on personally. The massive work includes more than 20,000 titles of works related to the Arctic, focusing on scientific and explorers' texts. She authored A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 1751–1800 , a monumental text published in 1952 that is considered the cornerstone of book history studies in Canada. It meticulously detailed more than 1,200 books, pamphlets, and broadsides produced across early Canadian provinces. In 1970, Marie Tremaine was elected honorary life president of the Bibliographic Society of Canada. Also, to honour the corpus of her bibliographic work, the Bibliograph...

Jack Brown, n.d. Jack Brown had a remarkable career in librarianship. He worked in public, university, and special libraries. Some measure of his influence can be gauged from the many organizations he was involved with over three decades in Canada and the United States. He was a Councillor for the Canadian Library Association (1961–64), a Director of the Association of College & Research Libraries (1961–64), an ongoing Secretary for the National Research Council Association Committee on Scientific Information, the VIce-President of the International federation for Documentation (1965–67), a longtime member of the Special Libraries Association, and also the Ontario Library Association.  Jack Brown was mostly responsible for spearheading the building of CISTI, the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, which opened on the National Research Council's Montreal Road campus in 1974 (now known as Building M-55). Under his leadership, CISTI became one of the wo...

Charles Henry Gould is a significant figure in Canadian library history. From the time of his appointment as University Librarian at McGill University in 1892 until his death in 1919, he made valuable contributions to the emerging vocation of librarianship. He was instrumental in persuading the American Library Association to convene its annual conference in Montreal in 1900, during which he invited librarians to a meeting to form a Canadian library association that eventually became the Ontario Library Association in 1901. Gould developed McGill's collection in the Redpath Library, which became Canada's largest academic library in the early 20th century. In the field of library education, he initiated a summer course for librarians in 1904 that evolved into the McGill Library School, accredited by the American Library Association in 1927, shortly after his death. While he served as ALA President from 1908–09, the organization moved its headquarters to Chicago and revised its...