Raymond Tanghe on Québec libraries and librarianship, 1952–1962

Pour un système cohérent de bibliothèques au Canada français by Raymond Tanghe. Montréal: Fides, 1952, 38 p.

Le bibliothécariat by Raymond Tanghe. Montréal: Fides, 1962. 117 p.

Raymond Tanghe (portrait at right c.1962) was born in France in 1898 and came to Canada in 1920 after serving in the French army during the First World War. He was an academic by choice and earned a PhD at the Université de Montréal in 1928.  His professional writings were in human and economic geography, especially urban planning, at the l’École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Montréal in the 1930s. He became a professor and later Director of the central library of the Université de Montréal from 1942 to 1953. He had a flare for popular and scholarly writing and worked with Radio-Canada during the Second World War. Tanghe worked to centralize holdings at the University and expressed his opinion that it would benefit faculty and students at the Quebec Library Association meeting in 1945. In 1948, he became President of the Association canadienne des bibliothécaires de langue française (ACBLF) for two terms before he moved to Ottawa in 1953 to become the Assistant National Librarian at the National Library of Canada.

In this more expansive role in Ottawa, he became better acquainted with Canadian librarianship and the close relationship many librarians had with bibliographic work during the 1950s. He served as President of the Bibliographical Society of Canada from 1958 to 1960. Under his editorship, the Bibliography of Canadian Bibliographies was published in 1960 with 1665 entries, almost half authored by library school students in two major centres, Montreal and Toronto. Tanghe began his third career after retiring from the National Library in 1963 to return to France by taking up the direction of the Maison des étudiants canadiens à Paris, where he mentored students in a congenial learning environment until his retirement in 1968. He died in Montreal in 1969 after a short illness.

Raymond Tanghe did not possess formal training in librarianship. Like many of his male predecessors in Canada, he was an academic, a man of literary tastes who learned about the operation of libraries from administrative experience and personal observation of an emerging profession. In the course of a decade, he penned three valuable library works: one to propose a plan for a province-wide public library system, one to describe and publicize the library profession, and one to outline the history of a professional French-speaking library school in Montreal. In many ways, Tanghe’s contributions to Canadian librarianship represent the nationalist sentiment and growth of secularism in Quebec during the 1950s and early 1960s. The fifteen years before the beginning of the ‘Quiet Revolution’ in 1960 was an evolutionary time to a more liberal, worldly-minded society in which the role of the Catholic Church was reduced. In 1945, Quebec society was deeply influenced by the Church; for example, parish libraries substituted as public libraries in most parts of the province, and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum continued as an authoritative catalogue to censor reading authors such as Émile Zola or Jean-Paul Sartre. Changes came gradually: in 1948, Quebec adopted its provincial flag, the Fleurdelisé; in 1952, Radio-Canada began television broadcasting from Montreal, which accentuated Quebec’s political, cultural, and social affairs; and in 1956, the Tremblay Commission called for greater provincial government control of social and financial affairs. Influenced by this report, Quebec eventually adopted its first general public libraries act in December 1959.

Tanghe’s major publication in 1952 by the firm Fides, Pour un système cohérent de bibliothèques au Canada français, first appeared as three articles in the 1951 issues of the journal Lectures. His pamphlet represented a blend of current and retrospective library views. The traditional concept of library service, parish libraries, had existed since the 19th century in Quebec communities, embodying a Catholic humanism that emphasized moral and spiritual principles. By 1950, mid-century modernist library thought invoked the concept of systematic operations, professionalism, and the more secular philosophy of public service. Generally, Tanghe was sympathetic to the traditional course but recognized libraries as basic public sector institutions. His introduction emphasized the need for libraries to educate both rural and urban workers. He believed it was important to elevate people’s reading to counter the harmful influence of cinemas or radio by enriching their intellectual, moral, and spiritual lives. As a primary starting point, Tanghe took up the cause of the brief ‘Manifesto’ published first in 1944 and again in 1947 by l’École de bibliothécaires (formed in Montreal in 1937) and supported by the Quebec library community he was most closely associated with, the ACBLF. This wartime statement expressed the idea that public libraries were essentially an educational responsibility of the province and its municipalities, although religious considerations, Catholic and Protestant, remained vital elements. The statement proposed that the Catholic Committee of Public Education organize a Provincial Office of Libraries, overseeing urban municipal library commissions and regional library councils in rural areas, responsible for one or more counties or a regional church diocese. Establishing a provincial body in conjunction with the formation of municipal and rural authorities would facilitate the promotion of legislation, surveys, policies, distribution of grants, and operation of libraries.

Tanghe elaborated on this basic scheme in more detail. He proposed provincial library legislation (p. 16) to:
(a) to authorize municipalities to establish and maintain libraries with municipal revenues after taxpayers first presented a petition to municipal councils to establish a library;
(b) to create a Library Service (“Service de bibliothèques”) within the Department of Public Education to be responsible for the administration of general assistance to public libraries, free of charge. A Board of Management (“Bureau de direction”) would head the Service and be admitted to sit on the Roman Catholic Committee of the Council of Public Instruction. The delivery of services would be the responsibility of larger ‘provincial libraries’ (such as the renowned Bibliothèque Saint-Sulpice in Montreal), a Central agency (to be organized), and local libraries used by the public in municipalities and parishes. The provincial libraries (p. 19–21) had a dual responsibility to serve the public directly and foster cooperative efforts with other libraries.

The formation of a central establishment (“Centrale”) was the heart of Tanghe’s système cohérent (p. 21–22). It was an efficient system for selecting, purchasing, binding, cataloguing, and distributing books by well-trained specialists. As well, it was charged with sending books in travelling libraries to municipal or parish libraries and book-impoverished rural areas (p. 24–26). At the head of the system, the Library Service needed competent personnel at five different levels (p. 29–31): administrators, ‘inspecteurs-propagandistes’ (people skilled in public relations and able to provide library advice), librarians, technicians, and warehouse workers. Interestingly, Tanghe recommended that technicians possess a diploma in library science to carry out clerical tasks such as recording loans. Librarians required good judgement and a broad culture for good book selection (an elitist view held by the author), classify resources, and acquire an in-depth knowledge of library resources and sources of bibliographic information. Librarian candidates (Tanghe seems to assume these came from the École de Bibliothécaires) needed to take an introductory course at the end of their studies in one of the provincial libraries.

In a nod to the practical reality of everyday life in Quebec, Tanghe accepted the continuation of parish libraries as ‘public libraries’ (p. 31–35) for mostly rural Catholic, French-speaking Canadians, hardly an innovative program even by 1950s conservative standards. In fact, a more influential contemporary, Edmond Desrochers, published a study, Le rôle social des bibliothèques publiques in 1952 which concluded that parish libraries should be replaced by municipal public libraries. These were different perspectives because Tanghe perceived Quebec’s parish system as a cohesive centre of life fostering solidarity in many communities. From his academic planning viewpoint, social collectivism was a primary goal which libraries could contribute to within the parishes (p. 13): “Dans la province de Québec, la paroisse est une collectivité socialement organisée, qui a un centre de ralliement, qui possède ou peut fonder des œuvres adaptées au groupe humain qui la compose.” Recognizing that many parishes were underfunded and could not form working libraries, he recommended small collections of about 1,000 volumes and provincial subsidies for parish libraries, which could sustain and invigorate their activities; for example, Tanghe calculated for $60,000/year about 500 parishes could be supplied with rotating travelling book collections on a monthly basis. But, in fact, most existing parish libraries held only meagre collections and were poorly administered, as the Tremblay Commission discovered a few years later in 1956. Chaired by Justice Thomas Tremblay, this report called for further study and the passage of public library legislation to form the basis of future growth.

Even with approval from Catholic authorities (Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger authored an introduction to the pamphlet), Tanghe’s systematic plan that included parishes did not attract much attention at a political level because many officials recognized the era of parish libraries was passing as society became more secular and the power of the Church lessened, and the role government increased. This transition is illustrated by the National Film Board 1959 production, Il faut qu'une bibliothèque soit ouverte ou fermée, which depicts the efforts of the townspeople of Montmagny to create a municipal public library. However, the ideas of a central commission, municipal libraries, and regional entities—a common North American trend by this time—as operatives of library services did foreshadow future directions. In 1959, the Quebec Legislature adopted a law for public libraries which contained three important clauses:
(a) the creation of a Quebec Library Commission to investigate problems relating to the establishment, maintenance and development of public libraries;
(b) the formation of a Quebec Library Service headed by a director of public libraries who can maintain staffing to carry out its proper functioning;
(c) the establishment of a budget line of $200,000 for the fiscal year 1960-61 to cover the cost of implementing the new law.

This law was a modest, progressive step. The many details and mechanics that Tanghe laboured to provide in his pamphlet were not dusted off for action, which was the fate of many reports. However, his underlying confidence that there was a French culture and identity for Quebec libraries to foster and maintain set his program apart from other contemporary Canadian library 1950s reports in British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and New Brunswick. This belief was a lasting legacy in its own right.

Watch the 26 minute NFB film directed by Raymond Garceau in 1959, Il faut qu'une bibliothèque soit ouverte ou fermée, which illustrates the changing views on public library service in the small town of Montmagny.

* * * * *

Towards the end of his twenty-year library career, Tanghe published a work that revealed the nature of his views on librarianship after a decade at the National Library in Ottawa. In Le bibliothécariat, a short book—really an essay—of just over 100 pages that appeared in 1962 (reprinted in 1964), he outlined the major aspects of librarianship he had observed over almost two decades. This French language book was the first publication of its kind in Canada; indeed, it reflected a consensus of Canadian librarianship in mid-century. For the most part, Canadian trained professional librarians relied on publications from the American Library Association. Thus, Tanghe was breaking new ground, although his primary aim was to reach students, especially those in Quebec interested in choosing librarianship as a career, his own scholarly way of mentoring. In his introduction, he declared that he would primarily discuss the qualities and training required to be a librarian and offer his views on the true nature of librarianship (p. 7) instead of publishing a textbook. Then, he makes his case for librarianship in eight chapters: the general field, required skills and qualities, basic training, professional development, the actual work, administrators, salaries and working conditions, and a brief proposal for a collective services project for Quebec.

In his survey of the field in Canada, Tanghe raised some interesting points. He noted the shortage of librarian professionals to fill positions (a problem that existed throughout the 1950s) and made three observations (p. 16) that characterized librarianship at the time:
1) there was an overall lack of librarians in relation to the population served by all types of libraries;
2) professional librarians only accounted for a third of the total staff in public libraries;
3) positions were filled predominately by women.
Tanghe felt administrators were addressing the persistent shortage by having library assistants assume more duties. In a period when the demarcation between clerical routines and professional duties in North American libraries was known to be ambiguous, the author made his position clear for larger libraries (p. 18–19):
Library assistant duties: 1) short cataloguing, 2) classification of files, 3) circulation and loans, 4) checking-in periodicals, 5) controlling receipts, 6) inventorying.
Librarian duties: 1) directing library assistants, 2) detailed cataloguing, 3) classification, 4) reviewing magazines, 5) preparing bibliographies, 6) reference and orientation services, 7) acquisitions, subscriptions, exchanges, and 8) cooperating with other libraries.
Finally, he asserted that the traditional stereotypes associated with librarianship, often attributed unfairly to women, were no longer applicable. Librarianship now was more dynamic with challenging positions requiring more intelligence, initiative, and imagination on the part of young women and men interested in collaborative work in the humanities and sciences. However, despite this progressive view shared by most in the field, Tanghe restated the dated arguments that women were mostly responsible for lower salaries and that men were often candidates for administrative positions because women frequently left the profession for marriage (p. 20).

In discussing librarian characteristics and necessary skill sets, Tanghe declared libraries are service organizations, a generally accepted attribute by mid-century. Thus, a primary personal quality is serviabilité, the need to provide helpful assistance—service with a smile and an outgoing personality. The ability to approach work methodologically and follow directions were two more essential personal traits. Respect (perhaps love) for books was an obvious aspect of daily work given the state of collections in the 1960s. Intellectual curiosity and the need to be adaptable were also requisite personal attributes for success. With the idea of la tolérance, the ability to be fair, understanding, and well-balanced, Tanghe broached the subject of library neutrality and censorship at a time when societal changes were sweeping North America. He concluded that judgement about resources and a person’s right to read should be considered within the context of morality and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Notably, he was writing shortly before Canadian courts began ruling more liberally concerning the censorship of books and before the Catholic Church ended the authority of the Index in 1966. Finally, the author suggested that a stable, career-driven curve best served the individual librarian, especially from the standpoint of employers. One noticeable characteristic that appeared in the contemporary library literature that Tanghe ignored was the capacity for leadership, although he dealt with the practice of administration in a separate chapter. Otherwise, his six attributes were all conventional when Le bibliothécariat was published in 1962. But, with the passage of time, we know employers now look to different workplace requirements that situate his observations in a historical period of mid-century modernism which libraries have passed through.

Similarly, the book’s focus on basic training for semi-professionals and professionals now seems dated, although it was considered standard when he was writing. Possession of a degree before entering library school was a regular practice by 1960. He provides background on two French-language library schools in Montreal and Ottawa which were beginning to attempt to secure accreditation from the American Library Association (ALA). Today, the 1951 ALA requirements seem dated, but at the time they were not easily achieved in a Canadian context:
1) a library school must be an integral part of a recognized university;
2) a school must have secure financial funding, adequate premises and equipment;
3) a school must have a sufficiently large faculty with authority and jurisdiction to establish and conduct its programs.
It would be many years before the University of Montreal or Ottawa achieved accreditation, but their older histories are interesting in their own right due to their French-language emphasis. Also, Tanghe went into some detail about the need for professional development after entry into the workplace. He suggested that additional education and broader interest in the human sciences, namely anthropology, and social, economic and political science, would benefit many. He raised the issue of librarianship as a profession at some length (p. 57–61), citing the work of Father Jacques Lazure (University of Ottawa), a sociologist who had spoken to a conference of Quebec librarians in 1961. Lazure (and many others) stated librarianship was not yet a profession. Yet, Tange felt that professional status, especially the adoption of its ideals and the feeling of group solidarity, eventually could be attained. Librarians needed to be proactive and recognize that service was the essential feature of librarianship and required requisite collective professionalism. He pointed to the Quebec library group, L’Association canadienne des bibliothécaires de langue française, as an organizing force in this direction (p. 63).

A lengthy chapter (p. 67–91) on library work is now mainly of historical interest. Mid-century modernization in acquisitions work, cataloguing and classification of books, binding and other routine techniques were technical aspects that involved a large portion of staffing. Departmental responsibilities for public services involved reference, research, circulation of books, reader orientation, bookmobiles, and audio-visual service. Of more interest is Tanghe’s brief account of ‘information science’ or ‘documentation’ as it was better known at the time. He mentions the work of Mortimer Taube who developed coordinate indexing in the 1950s and wrote about information storage and retrieval. Tanghe believed scientific libraries were being established more frequently, and their newer concepts of library work would expand traditional librarianship (p. 83). Of course, the author noted the excellent work of the National Library, especially its union catalogue and close working relationship with the Public Archives of Canada.

 

A chapter on the role of administrators reveals a more personal approach by the author, who had worked as Assistant National Librarian for a decade. Tanghe knew it was a practical matter for aspiring librarians to recognize administrative ability and tasks to advance their careers. His ideas generally followed the classic public sector organizational theory, POSDCORB, developed in the 1930s. This management acronym stood for Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, Co-Ordinating, Reporting and Budgeting. By applying these general tenets, Tanghe describes what he considered to be the main functions of management: (1) the recruitment of new staff and personnel direction, promotion, and management; (2) budgeting and financial control; (3) the organization of equipment, furnishings, and buildings; (4) the development of collections; (5) establishing and maintaining library policies and regulations; (8) and public relations. His mention of the Farmington Plan, a cooperative effort to acquire and store foreign language materials for American libraries, is of historical interest because it set a pattern for subsequent cooperative collection development programs before it ended in 1972.

Two brief chapters follow. One was on salaries and working conditions circa 1960, and the other was entitled Collective Services Project for Quebec. It offers some of his prescriptions for library development in his home province. Leading by example was a central point in Tanghe’s mind: in Le bibliothécariat he was passing the torch to a new generation of leaders at an opportune point in time. The École de bibliothéconomie of the Université de Montréal had just been founded in 1961; afterwards, more university-trained librarians began to adopt a scientific approach to their profession, and, in 1969, they formed the Corporation of Professional Librarians of Québec. Tanghe’s publication followed in the footsteps of Library Science for Canadians published in 1936 but his focus was upon the nature and working conditions of the profession, not the emerging academic field. These two publications were significant landmarks in the literature of Canadian librarianship before the rapid growth of the 1960s.

My earlier post on Library Science for Canadians, composed by two University of Western Ontario librarians, Beatrice Welling and Catherine Campbell, appeared in 2016.

Special Libraries go on the air “Putting Knowledge to Work” in Montreal, 1936

Montreal Gazette, May 5, 1936

The 28th annual conference of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) was held in Montreal at the Mount Royal Hotel on rue Peel from June 16–19, 1936. It was the third time SLA had come to Canada for its yearly convention, having joined with the American Library Association’s conferences at Ottawa in 1912 and at Toronto in 1927. But on this occasion, SLA chose to convene on its own because a separate, very active SLA Chapter in Montreal had formed in May 1932 with 19 original members. At this time, Montreal was the business and financial capital of Canada. The new Chapter soon expanded rapidly to almost 70 members and to other libraries in regional centres: Ottawa, Toronto, and Winnipeg. The Chapter also had strong leaders, especially Mary Jane Henderson. Special librarianship quickly attracted several Canadians from libraries such as the Royal Bank of Canada, Sun Life Assurance Company, Canadian Industries, École Polytechnique, Montreal Board of Trade, McGill University, Forest Products Laboratory of Canada, the Insurance Institute of Montreal, the Dominion Bureau of Statistics and the National Research Library. The chapter’s quarterly Bulletin first appeared in January 1935 edited by Beatrice V. Simon, a McGill University medical librarian. Although the Depression era still lingered, it was a vibrant time of growth for Canadian special librarians.

Mary Jane Henderson (BA, Queen’s University, 1925; BLS, Pratt Institute School of Library Science, 1926) was the first president of the Montreal Chapter. Henderson was an accomplished organizer who was inducted into the Special Libraries Association Hall of Fame in 1964 after her retirement. She made the host arrangements and organized a successful program under the theme, “Putting Knowledge to Work,” for the 1936 conference expected to attract about 200–300 people. The Mount Royal Hotel (today a renovated shopping mall) served as the conference headquarters. Henderson coordinated the work of four essential committees: programs, luncheons and banquet, local arrangements, and advance publicity. She also helped enlist prominent speakers. For the Friday general session. Brooke Claxton, a distinguished Montreal lawyer, addressed SLA delegates on the question of peace and war: “I thought it would be interesting for us, for a time, to see if we have any common reaction to that fear of war which everyone throughout the world shares today.” Claxton would eventually rise in political ranks to become Canada’s Minister of National Defence in 1946. B.K. Sandwell, the liberal-minded editor of Saturday Night published in Toronto, echoed the theme of Anglo-American relations. He spoke during a luncheon to three SLA groups on the issue of cross-border “trade” in ideas noting the impact of Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefeller Foundation on Canadian culture. Two prominent McGill men, Sir Andrew MacPhail and Lt.-Colonel Wilfrid Bovey, spoke at the evening banquet on Thursday. MacPhail entertained his audience regarding his views on the gradual transition in library work: the business of a special librarian, he concluded, was not to accumulate books but to select and “selection is the main business of art, of the artist, and of the genius, which a librarian must be.”

A notable conference highlight featured three radio talks carried by the CBC network in eastern Canada at 6:15 p.m. on three weeknight evenings. Radio broadcasts by librarians were not innovative, but SLA’s reach on the CBC spanned thirteen stations from Toronto to Halifax and Charlottetown was a Canadian first.The SLA President, William F. Jacobs, General Electric, opened with an introduction to special libraries.

We special librarians have in our files such diversified material as newspaper clippings, pamphlets, magazines, telephone directories, corporation directories, yearbooks, government documents, advertisements, art prints, and so on. To us, all this is knowledge — knowledge needed by the business man, the research worker or the specialist in his profession. And it is our job to see that this knowledge is usefully applied.

He was followed by Eleanor Cavanaugh, librarian at Standard Statistics Co., New York City, who explained how a business could profit from its own library resources. After offering a few examples, she stated, “The special librarian has, in the past twenty-five years, justified the judgment of those executives who realized the need of some organized and centralized fact-finding department within their own organization.” Angus Fletcher, Director of the British Library of Information in New York, delivered the final radio session devoted to “Putting Government Documents to Work.” The British Library in New York had a unique function in the SLA fellowship which was populated mostly by business concerns. This library was part of a growing Anglo-American culture spanning the Atlantic.

“It was established in the year 1920 and attached to the British Consulate-General in the city of New York. Its task is to serve the general public as a library of authoritative information on British affairs, and it is also the office to which appropriate questions are referred by the British Embassy and Consulates in the United States.”

Delegates concluded the convention on Friday afternoon with a short tour and a social tea at the Royal St. Lawrence Yacht Club, hosted by the city of Montreal, before returning home. By all accounts, especially in newspapers, the SLA’s annual meeting was a success. The host chapter had enlisted the aid of McGill University, the CBC, the Quebec Library Association, municipal and provincial officials to bolster their confidence. They were justly proud of hosting SLA and realizing the Montreal chapter had attained the seventh largest membership in just four years! This organizational experience would stand the chapter in good stead in the prewar years. The group would participate in two more important Canadian inter-provincial library conferences held in Ottawa in 1937 and Montreal in 1939 by offering organization assistance and speakers to highlight their respective views. Its example encouraged special librarians in Toronto to form their own chapter in 1940 and, eventually, host SLA’s annual conference there in 1952.

Further reading:

Selected speeches, the conference program, three radio broadcasts, and various SLA reports are available in the digitized issue of Special Libraries for July-August 1936.

D’obscurantisme et de Lumières: La Bibliothèque Publique au Québec by François Séguin (2016)

D’obscurantisme et de Lumières: La Bibliothèque Publique au Québec, des Origines au 21e Siècle by François Séguin. Montréal: Éditions Hurtubise (Cahiers du Québec, no. 168), 2016.

The presence of libraries in Quebec stretches back almost four centuries; their history is complex and plentiful. Now, François Séguin has composed a comprehensive and noteworthy history of libraries used by the public on various terms from the 18th to the 21st century. The author worked for many years in Montreal’s public libraries and has witnessed firsthand the developments over the last forty years. As a historical work, the focus is primarily on the era before 1950; the progress made after the Quiet Revolution is dealt with more briefly. The title reveals the fundamental theme of enlightened progress impeded by conservative elements opposed to the democratization of library access to public reading and knowledge. The author explores why predominantly French-speaking Quebec has undergone an ideological/political library struggle that was not present in other Canadian regions. Yet, there are similarities with English-speaking counterparts: like other North American library developments, the manifestations of the “public library” in Quebec has passed through periods of private, semi-private, and tax-supported services that ranged from the exclusionary use of shareholder/subscribers to municipal entities usually free to local/regional residents. It is this eventful passage that will fascinate many readers.

A summary of the book’s twelve chapters must, of course, not do justice to the depth of Séguin’s scholarship and his ability to provide an appealing narrative based on the history of individual libraries. An introductory chapter briefly outlines private and institutional libraries in New France before the British conquest in 1760. The establishment in 1632 of the Bibliothèque du Collège des Jésuites was a significant highlight of the French regime, but it was not for public use. The concept of public use and literacy growth was demonstrated by the establishment of small subscription libraries, commercial lending libraries, reading rooms, newsrooms, and mechanics’ institutes (instituts d’artisans) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The appeal of these organizations to different clienteles is outlined in the following three chapters, 2 to 4. These libraries were utilized mainly by urban elites, professionals, and people engaged in business. Before the province of Lower Canada was united with Upper Canada to form one British colony in 1841, the major points of interest were:
1764 — Germain Langlois forms a commercial circulating library at Quebec;
1779 — British Governor Haldimand founds the bilingual Bibliothèque de Québec/The Quebec Library;
1828 — The establishment of Mechanics’ Institute of Montreal (now the Atwater Library).

At this point, 1841-42, an extraordinary French visitor from the United States, Alexandre Vattemare, an exponent of free public libraries and the universal distribution of reading through exchanges of books, arrived (chapter 5). In Montreal and Quebec, he proposed the union of local societies into one institute that would form a library, museum, and exhibition halls bolstered by his exchange plan. Séguin devotes an entire chapter to his efforts which did not materialize but ultimately led to the formation of the Institut Canadien in 1844 in Montreal. The intellectual ferment of the early 1840s also stimulated a response from conservatives anxious to block liberal, secular ideas that might threaten the conservative elite and the Catholic Church’s authority. Two chapters (6 and 7) explain the problems encountered by the Institutes Canadiennes in Montreal and Quebec and the development of the parish library (bibliothèque paroissiale) by Catholic authorities. For a century to come, the parish libraries were open for readers, but their organizers placed priority on a rigid system of morality that taught acceptance and passivity in social and political matters. Orthodoxy was more important than the liberal sponsorship of public lectures, debates, and circulating collections that the institutes promoted. The opening of the “Œuvre des Bons Livres” in Montreal by the Sulpician Order in 1842 signalled decades of conflict between the two philosophies while the church succeeded in establishing its hegemony over public reading and defeating the philosophy of the two institutes. The Catholic hierarchy was determined to stiffle the influence of “bad books” by providing “good” ones.

After Confederation in 1867, the Sulpicians began to play an important role in championing publicly authorized reading (chapter 8), notwithstanding the proclamation of an 1890 provincial Act (seldom used) that authorized municipal corporations to maintain public libraries. When Montreal’s civic authorities failed to secure funding from Andrew Carnegie to establish a public library, the Sulpicians founded the famous Bibliothèque Saint-Sulpice for the public and scholars. Eventually, in 1967, its collections became part of the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec and later, after 2002, the provincial government integrated its resources with the Grande Bibliothèque, one of the busiest public libraries in Canada. The formation of the “GB” owed much to the sponsorship of Lucien Bouchard, the leader of the Premier of Quebec between 1996-2001. This chapter of D’obscurantisme et de Lumières underscores the author’s general theme and how social and political elements impact public library development.

The Saint-Suplice Library was a remarkable beaux-arts style building, but it was followed shortly afterwards by an equally imposing edifice in the same architectural style, the Bibliothèque municipale de Montréal, which opened in 1917. By the turn of the twentieth century, there were gradual social, economic, and political forces underway that would eventually undermine the dominance of the parish library in local communities as well as the authority of the clergy in determining collection building. English-speaking minorities, especially in major urban centres and the Eastern Townships, evoked the rhetoric of the Anglo-American public library movement, which embraced municipal control and free access at the entry point for public libraries. Séguin charts the course of this inexorable movement in three chapters, 9 to 11. In Montreal, the Fraser Institute, Quebec’s first free library for the public, opened in 1885, followed by anglophone public libraries in Sherbrooke, Knowlton, and Haskell. Westmount opened another free library in 1899. Even a small francophone municipality, Sainte-Cunégonde, founded a free library immediately before Montreal annexed it in 1905. However, Montreal’s municipal public library on Sherbrooke Street grew slowly because financial resources from the city for collections and staffing were in short supply during its first half-century of existence. Children’s work and a film service were not introduced until a quarter-century after the library opened. After the Second World War, the forces of urbanization, secularization, and the unique national identity of Quebec began to change the province’s political culture and introduced a new important player in public library development--the provincial government.

The book’s final chapter (11) deals with the growth of public libraries after 1959 when the province passed a modest provincial law for public libraries authorizing municipal establishment and control of library services. Regional libraries were planned and formed, professional staffing was encouraged, improved revenues from local government were secured, new branch libraries opened, and new library associations formed that emphasized social issues, such as intellectual freedom. In the early 1980s, Denis Vaugeois, the Minister of Cultural Affairs, emphasized library development with a five-year development plan that improved infrastructure and services substantially. Yet, when the province rescinded the outdated 1959 library legislation, no new specific library act was enacted. Instead, the province moved to establish the Grande Bibliotheque in Montreal, an outstanding circulating and reference library for all Québécois. However, lacking a general law, basic principles, especially free access to resources, remains a legacy of flawed, incremental plans . The current general legislation, one concerning the Ministry of Culture and Communications, has governed public libraries since 1992. Séguin entitles his chapter on the twentieth century “un laborieux cheminement,” an appropriate designation.

D’obscurantisme et de Lumières is a rich narrative firmly focused on the institutional development of libraries and their public value in terms of access to books, the intellectual or recreational content of collections, and a broad range of formats that have challenged the dominance of print after the first decades of the 20th century and the popularity of radio. Séguin uses many documentary sources to illustrate his chapters: quotes from bishops, politicians, and librarians; newspapers such as Le Devoir; personal correspondence; municipal debates; government reports; and, of course, library reports. Influential American practices, such as the Dewey Decimal Classification and the evolution of library science education in degree-granting universities, are evident. But several decisive post-1950 changes are not in evidence. There is little in the book about societal changes, for example, the transformation to electronic-virtual-digital libraries, the “Information Highway” of the 1990s, gender roles (especially the predominance of males in administration), the image of the library or librarians in films or television that reflected societal views, or the effects of library automation and efforts to network libraries for collective usage. Perhaps a few in-depth case studies of major libraries outside Montreal might have been used to illustrate library progress. For example: more emphasis on how the Institut Canadien de Québec, which initially accepted the church’s authority on morality and orthodoxy, then evolved in a singular way into Quebec City’s public library after municipal control in 1887; or, how the regionalization of rural library service proceeded after 1960. The use of informative sidebars on Montreal’s two library schools, influential librarians (e.g., Ægidius Fauteux), children’s libraries, or library associations such as ASTED or the l'Association des bibliothécaires du Québec/Quebec Library Association could advance our knowledge of library progress.

However, these observations in no way diminish the significance of D’obscurantisme et de Lumières as it stands. François Séguin has made a valuable contribution to Canadian library history and allows his readership to understand better the cultural forces that determined library development and the course of librarianship in Quebec. The issues I pose simply suggest that a second book by the author employing various contemporary themes would be equally helpful for those eager to know more about Quebec’s remarkable library history.

Les bibliothèques canadiennes, 1604-1960 by Antonio Drolet (1965)

Les bibliothèques canadiennes, 1604-1960 by Antonio Drolet. Ottawa: Le Cercle du Livre de France, 1965. 234 p., tables.

Antonio Drolet, n.d.

Antonio Drolet was born in Québec City on July 31, 1904, and studied at the Petit Séminaire de Québec where many young Catholic clerics were educated. He earned his BA at Université Laval in 1925. Eventually,  he chose a career outside religious studies: he became an academic librarian at Laval. He also performed duties as a Secretary to the respected literary critic and rector of Laval, Camille Roy. Later, he organized and directed work at the library in the Faculty of Medicine at Sainte-Foy from 1955-1961. In 1964, Drolet became chief librarian at the Archives of Québec. During his career, he published important works, notably Bibliographie du roman canadien-français 1900–1950 in 1955 and Les Bibliothèques canadiennes 1604–1960 in 1965 along with many scholarly articles on libraries, especially in the vicinity of Quebec City (see below). Drolet died on June 30, 1970.

Antonio Drolet's history of Canadian libraries was a groundbreaking work in Canadian library historiography and owed much to his knowledge of Canadian bibliography and his own scholarly work on libraries and book collections in the province of Quebec. In attempting to encompass the development of our nation's libraries from the arrival of French explorers to the postwar period after 1945, the author was examining an area of research that was, for the most part, a patchwork of regional histories and unsynthesized commentaries. Drolet was largely successful in striving to weld these pieces together in a sweeping historical survey of Canadian library development. More than half a century later, some parts may seem dated or insubstantial due to subsequent research, nevertheless, Les Bibliothèques canadiennes is still a reliable, concise account which blends Drolet's narrative and analysis, notably his portrayal of the considerable influence of the clergy in Quebec's public library development. Drolet was steadfast in his account of the historical ascendancy of public services at a time when Quebec's politics and culture in the 1960s -- the Quiet Revolution -- was fundamentally changing life in Quebec. Drolet seems to be deeply aware of this trend and, as a result, his general work remains an important starting point in historical inquiry, especially for the evolution of libraries in Quebec.

Drolet chose to divide Canada's library chronology into three parts, from (1) the early libraries in the French colony established by Samuel Champlain to the British military victories in the Seven Years' War at Québec City and Montréal (1604-1760), (2) the British colonial period to Confederation, to (3) the entire post-Confederation period (1867-1960) of developing nationhood. These dates mirror the earlier dominance of political history in Canada's past established by Canadian historians in the first part of the 20th century and the ideas that emerged from its colonial experience and the aftermath of Confederation. Of course, Drolet composed his work before the rise of new social history in Canadian universities that involved a variety of studies on urbanism, ethnicity, labour, demographics, regional or societal structures, and more complex patterns of chronology. It was sometimes called "history from below" or "history with the politics left out." This new history used different viewpoints and source materials and did not focus on attempts at a national synthesis. Drolet was composing his narrative at a time when French-language historians at two major universities, Laval and Montreal, were beginning to re-interpret Quebec's history using professional standards to investigate the province's social and cultural development beyond the traditional nationalist emphasis on the survival of francophone culture in a North American setting. Les Bibliothèques canadiennes displays an interest in print culture and book history, areas of study in their own right in relation to the field French-Canadian library history. Drolet's successors who have made authoritative contributions to Quebec's library history, such as Yvan Lamonde, Gilles Gallichan, or Marcel Lajeunesse -- have followed in this tradition of interrelating library history with printing and publishing, the history of books, literacy, reading, and intellectual development. These works reflect the new cultural historiography that became more influential on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s, many years after Drolet's publication appeared.

However, Drolet was also writing at a time when institutional and administrative concerns in library history -- the growth of collections, the spread of various types of libraries, or the tenure of chief administrators -- dominated local narratives, especially in American and Canadian English-speaking accounts. Drolet chose to focus on types of libraries and their development -- a typical institutional approach that is less favoured by historians now. His contemporaries writing library history echoed the liberal-democratic premise of practicing librarians and trustees who projected the idea of public libraries financed by municipalities and administered by trustees as a powerful force for literacy and democracy. To some extent, Drolet was not subject to this overarching Anglo-American-Canadian experience because he specialized in the course of Quebec's library development which had resisted this thinking. As he notes, even in 1930 a Liberal Premier of Quebec, Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, could state that the content of public libraries posed some threat, especially to youth (p. 173-74). However, while he adhered to the cultural-religious aspects of Quebec's library history, Drolet necessarily was concocting a national interpretation of the historical record emphasizing facts and events that often were institutional, administrative, and political in focus, thus giving weight to the progress of institutional growth.

In his first time frame, Drolet examines the libraries of New France, particularly private libraries of the colonial elite and Catholic religious institutions. The vast majority of private collections were not large and, as he notes, were often devoted to religious works, as were the libraries in churches and seminaries. He covers the entire period as one -- the reader does not get a sense of the growth of libraries in the French regime, perhaps because they were small and a "book culture" with contemporary printing presses and book stores was lacking. For institutional libraries, Drolet drew on his own published work, particularly the Séminaire de Québec (see below) which is still cited by scholars. The most important library in the French colony was the library of the Collège des Jésuites at Québec City which Drolet had published an extensive article on in 1961 (see below). He calculates that there were about 20,000 volumes in about 50 personal collections in New France (p. 25) with prominent French writers, Pascal, Descartes, and Montaigne available to readers (p. 45). He concludes his section on mostly private collections by noting the appearance of libraries for the public in North America, a trend the French colony had not experienced.

The central part of Les Bibliothèques canadiennes (1760-1867) is more successful in providing details that offer a sense of colonial library development including the background of difficulties inherent in Canada's burgeoning book trade, especially in Quebec. Commercial circulating libraries, subscription libraries (which Drolet terms as public, p. 88, because they did not belong to a person and attracted a limited clientele), English language mechanics' institutes and their French counterpart instituts d’artisans, school libraries, parliamentary libraries, professional libraries, public libraries of different types, parish libraries, college and university libraries begin to appear. Drolet examines the size of collections, for example, the Bibliothèque de Québec founded in 1779. The author's interest in parish libraries encouraged by the Catholic Church after 1840 stems from his earlier research (see below) and continues his observations on the importance of religion on library development in his home province. He finds the clergy repeatedly thwarting the development of local or municipal public libraries by acting as a conservative force to actively control social and cultural institutions, especially the foundation of libraries for the public in a general sense ("bibliothèques populaires" p. 135). In two notable cases, the visit of Alexandre Vattemare in 1840-41 which resulted in the founding of the controversial L’Institut canadien de Montréal (1844-80) and the refusal to accept money from Andrew Carnegie's program to build free public library buildings at the beginning of the 20th century, the Catholic ultramontane philosophy prevailed. The development of school libraries under Egerton Ryerson and Jean-Baptiste Meilleur is also highlighted. To illustrate the growth of libraries, there is a chronological table (p. 151-54) of the foundation of many Canadian libraries during this period, perhaps a realization on the author's part that a substantial descriptive history of all library development over one hundred years was not feasible in the early 1960s. Drolet was touching the surface of library history not burrowing deeper to examine the complexities of library formation, investigating the contribution of persons (politicians, trustees, librarians), or identifying general trends or geographic differences that influenced library growth.

In his final section, Drolet moves to a national stage beyond Quebec and Ontario and covers important libraries in ten Canadian provinces. Discussion is necessarily compressed, but it engages the reader with useful information and displays the author's extensive learning and dedication to details. At the same time, the author introduces government, business, school, and academic libraries. Generally, the primacy of private and public library history lessens and types of libraries multiply. In this time frame, as might be expected because he was writing before the influence of new social and cultural history approaches, Drolet remains fixed on an institutional focus, even with library education and the development of librarianship (p. 203-04). As the formation of provincial and national library associations comes into play, he notes the bi-cultural nature of Canadian librarianship: the formation of the Canadian Library Association (still bilingual at the time of Drolet's publication) and L'Association canadienne des bibliothécaires de langue française shortly after the Second World War. There is little opportunity to consider the societal impact of libraries, although the author indicates Quebec's decision to follow the example of Canadian-American public library development in other provinces with the formation of a provincial public library law in 1959.

Les Bibliothèques canadiennes has influenced Quebec authors in the past half-century, in part because Drolet was in tune with the changes of the Quiet Revolution and the need to secularize and reinterpret library history in his home province. Conversely, Drolet's work is seldom cited in English-language publications even though it could easily serve as an introductory handbook. A variety of reasons likely account for this neglect beyond the obvious obstacle of language and its brevity. The book's all-encompassing scope provided brief information on various types of libraries or librarians; its focus on private libraries, book collectors, and reading in Quebec did not attract researchers outside the province; some of its contents gradually became dated or known through other works; some important aspects, such as regional libraries, are scarcely mentioned; and, of course, it is now more than half a century past its original publication. Nevertheless, Drolet's history can still reward readers because the author was careful to establish his facts and confident enough to interpret more than three hundred years of Canada's past, an academic project which probably would be attempted by a collegial of effort in 2020.

Drolet's Bibliothèques canadiennes is available for readers at the Internet Archive of books.


Additional works by Drolet:

Antonio Drolet, “La Bibliothèque du Séminaire de Québec et son catalogue de 1782,” Le Canada Français 28, no. 3 (Nov. 1940): 261–266.
Antonio Drolet, “La bibliothèque de l'Université Laval,” La revue de l'Université Laval 7 (1952): 34–41.
Antonio Drolet, “La bibliothèque du Collège des Jésuites,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 14, no. 4 (mars 1961): 487–544.
Antonio Drolet, “L’Épiscopat canadien et les bibliothèques paroissiales de 1840 à 1900,” vol. 29, Rapport - Société canadienne d’histoire de l’Église catholique (Hull, Québec: Leclerc, 1962), 21–35.

About the author:

Alphéda Robitaille, “Hommage à un historien: Antonio Drolet, 1904–1970,” Archives: Revue de l'Association des Archivistes du Québec 70, no. 2 (juillet-décembre 1970), 32–42. [bibliography]
Charles-Marie Boissonnault, “Antonio Drolet, bibliothécaire et historien,” Proceedings and Transactions and of the Royal Canadian Society, Antonio Drolet, bibliothécaire et historien (1972), 127–134.

Les Bibliothèques Populaires (1890) by Eugène Rouillard

Les Bibliothèques Populaires by Eugène Rouillard. Québec: L.-J. Demers & Frère, 1890. 61 p.

Eugène Rouillard was a man of many talents. He was born in Québec City in 1851 and died there in 1926 after a long career as a notary, journalist and writer, civil servant, and geographer. He studied at the Université Laval from 1872-75 and graduated with a degree in law. Although he was notary at the beginning of his career, he turned to journalism as a writer and editor of newspapers and then to work in government positions for three decades. In his government positions he dealt with a wide variety of issues, such as land sales, colonization issues, and lawsuits. Rouillard came to be well respected by contemporaries: he became a member of the Société du Parler Français au Canada, the Geographical Society of Quebec, and, in 1915, the Royal Society of Canada. He was grounded in the political life of his home province and his journalistic and civil service background familiarized him with Anglo-Saxon concepts of government and civil society with respect to public services. He was the author of a number of books: Our Rivers and Lakes (1895); The White Coal: The Water-Powers of the Province of Quebec (1909), and an important work on public libraries which will be discussed here.

Rouillard was one of a number of Canadian library promoters agitating for free public libraries after 1880. John Hallam, in Toronto, was notably successful after publishing his Notes by the Way on Free Libraries and Books with a Plea for the Establishment of Rate-Supported Libraries in the Province of Ontario in 1882. The Saint John Free Library, which opened in 1883, owed much to the work of Colonel James Domville and a committee of women headed by Miss Manning Skinner. In Montreal, the bequest of Hugh Fraser led to the establishment of the Fraser Institute, open free to the public in 1885. There many other people in localities across Canada--enough to label their activity as the "public library movement." By 1891, Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec had all passed provincial laws enabling municipalities to support free public libraries through regular taxation.

Les Bibliothèques Populaires (1890) appeared at a time when public library development in Canada, especially Quebec, was at an early stage. There were a variety of interpretations about "bibliothèques populaires", i.e. "popular libraries" or "libraries for the people" as they were known in Europe, especially France. These libraries usually concentrated on recreational rather than educational collections. In North America, public libraries might be regarded simply as library that was not a personal collection, as libraries for public access resulting from private initiatives (e.g., the Fraser Institute opened in Montreal), as libraries established by an organization requiring small fees for public use, or as municipally rate-supported public institutions that allowed local residents free access to reading materials at the point of entry. It was this last sense that drew Rouillard's interest and led him to publish his pamphlet promoting public libraries in the same year that the Quebec provincial government, under the premiership of Honoré Mercier, was about to issue legislation authorizing cities, towns, and villages to support free libraries (or library associations and mechanics' institutes) through taxation (54 Vic., chap. 34, sec. 1-3). The promotion of free public libraries -- primarily a British and American ideal in 1890 -- might be construed as liberal politics. But it seems that Rouillard leaned more to the reformist politics that the Mercier government practiced in asserting Quebec's position in Confederation. Rouillard repeatedly mentions that free libraries complemented the evening courses for the working class that Mercier's nationalist party had created: "En un mot, la bibliothèque est le complément indispensable de l'école; l'une ne peut aller sans l'autre" (p. 18). Rouillard contended that the state owed the working class improved educational opportunities.

In two short sections, Rouillard surveys the development of free public libraries in the United States (p. 26-36). He was particularly impressed by the Chicago and Boston libraries which had grown rapidly after the 1850s. Magnificent donations to build libraries by John Jacob Astor (New York) and Andrew Carnegie (Pittsburgh) also drew his admiration: "les millionnaires qui se font non seulement un devoir, mais encore un honneur et une gloire de doter leur ville natale d'une bibliothèque à l'usage du peuple" (p. 31). Also, American states had established state laws that permitted municipalities to fund public libraries on an unprecedented scale. He wrote that Canada lagged far behind America both in philanthropic efforts to establish libraries and in government support.

Developments in Europe were also explored. He notes that fourteen free popular libraries already were receiving city ​​council grants in Paris. In Britain, public library legislation had been introduced years before in 1850. Rouillard's argumentation went beyond the free distribution of reading material in libraries. He claimed that many cities and towns in England, France, Switzerland, Belgium, and Germany offered regular evening courses and public speakers who gave their time and their knowledge for free as well.

But in Quebec, there was much work to be done to reach a similar state enjoyed by working-class people in the United State and Europe. "Dans la province de Québec — il faut bien le confesser — nous sommes encore sous ce rapport dans la première enfance" (p. 45). By comparison, Ontario was comfortably ahead: there were several free libraries and a host of libraries and evening classes of varying degree in mechanics' institutes. Rouillard accepted the idea that the education of the people was a legitimate concern of localities: "Aussi, je prétends que la ville qui veut avoir une bibliothèque chez elle doit intervenir et payer sa quote-part des frais généraux" (p. 57). Legislative grants from provincial governments were not incentive enough, each city or town must do its part. The generosity of Andrew Carnegie might not be matched in dollars, but there were rich men from the ranks of commerce and industry in Quebec who might be expected to support libraries. Rouillard concluded that the idea of popular libraries that had been launched was too noble, too big, too beautiful, and too patriotic not to catch on and flourish in the future (p. 61).

The pamphleteer made a good case in 1890, but it would be many decades before Montreal would adopt the public library concept he was advocating. At this time, the predominant position of most French Canadian leaders espoused the idea of a separate national identity for the Québécois people rather than the adoption of  Anglo-American conventions. When a proposal to use a $150,000 Carnegie grant for a new central library was floated by the mayor of Montreal in 1901, it was not accepted. The opening of a new municipal public library building on Sherbrooke Street in 1917 was of long gestation. By this time, Rouillard's treatise, grounded in the political life of Quebec in 1890, was less relevant. Nevertheless, today, when thousands of people enter the Grande Bibliothèque on Montreal's De Maisonneuve Boulevard every week, one can see that Rouillard's fundamental insight and rationale for the provision of free municipal libraries more than a century ago -- the expansion of knowledge in his home province -- was justified. In this respect, his work will reward students of library history and deepen our knowledge about the development of Canadian public libraries.

Eugène Rouillard's work is online at the Internet Archive

Rouillard's biography is available in English and French at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography site.

A Survey of Montreal Library Facilities and a Proposed Plan for a Library System (1942) by Mary Duncan Carter

A Survey of Montreal Library Facilities and a Proposed Plan for a Library System by Mary Duncan (Colhoun) Carter, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1942. xi, 180 leaves, tables, maps.

In the early 1940s Montreal's public library needs were only partially met by the 'big four,' the Civic Library, the Fraser Institute Library, the Mechanics' Institute Library, and the Westmount Public Library. Other libraries, the Children's Library, the Jewish People's Library, two dozen parish libraries operated by the Catholic Church, and a few special libraries also provided general reading. Compared to Toronto or cities of similar size in the United States--Cleveland, St. Louis, and Baltimore--there was no strong, centralized public library service. It was this particular circumstance that Mary Duncan Carter examined and sought to provide a coherent, systematic plan for metropolitan service in her 1942 dissertation.

Duncan Carter was no stranger to the Montreal situation. A native of St. Paul's, Minnesota, born in 1896, she joined the McGill library school as an assistant professor in 1927 after graduation from the University of Chicago with a Bachelor of Philosophy (1917) and then B.L.S. (1923) at the New York State Library School in Albany which later becoming the Columbia University School of Library Service in 1926. She married the Canadian photographer and fine-art dealer, Sidney Carter, in 1924 and taught at the McGill library school for ten years before leaving in 1937 to become the Director of the University of Southern California School of Library Science. Carter rose to prominence at USC and became President of the California Library Association in 1944.

Carter's thesis is a fascinating snapshot of libraries in Canada's metropolitan capital during the 1930s when statistics were available for various types of city libraries. In several chapters Carter reviewed the historical social conditions that underlay contemporary services, the resources available to Montrealers, and usage of a variety of libraries. Twenty-four parish libraries, operated by the Catholic Church, were studied in a separate chapter along with a case study of a special library at the Bell Telephone Company. Although there were an unusual number of rental libraries in Montreal during this period, Carter did not include them in her analysis of a 'public' system.

In 1933 the 'public library system' of Montreal (the four main public libraries) contained approximately 258,000 volumes. This figure was extremely small compared with public library holdings in cities of comparable size. There were 17,384 borrowers of the four main Montreal public libraries. Carter concluded

Perhaps the outstanding feature of the library pattern of Montreal is decentralization. Each of the four public libraries as well as each of the twenty-four parish libraries operates in complete independence and autonomy. Special libraries are by their very nature operated by and for separate groups. In Montreal certain special libraries, like those found in the Bell Telephone Company and the Royal Bank of Canada, even serve as general reading sources for industrial groups as well as sources for special technical material. (p.113)

Carter's plan for metropolitan service mostly worked within existing legislative constraints, e.g. in compliance with provincial and municipal laws and current administrative practices. She outlined three fundamental suggestions to provide city-wide coordination.
1. to continue the present group of libraries with increased municipal aid by removing all restrictions on the use of the libraries (e.g., removal of membership fees for users and non-residents);
2. to develop the Civic Library to fulfill its function as a municipal tax-supported
library of Montreal (e.g., establishing branches throughout the city);
3. to gradually integrate existing libraries with centralized administrative control (e.g., strengthening the collections of parish libraries).

Carter's blueprint for metropolitan service is too lengthy to elaborate in detail, but it included a variety of suggestions that seem, in retrospect, to have been possible to implement in the immediate post-1945 period in Montreal if municipal, church, and library officials could agree on its main points. The Fraser Library might service as a central reference library; the Civic Library could extend its services through new service points; Westmount might serve as a model for unserved areas in Mount Royal and Outremont; cooperative centralized purchasing, classifying and cataloging of books could simplify technical procedures, reduce costs, and make possible a unified catalogue of city holdings. Carter felt that parish libraries might be incorporated in an overall system by having the Civic Library develop deposit collections acceptable to the Church that could be made available to parish libraries that were willing to develop their physical facilities to meet certain minimum standards.

To coordinate planning and operations, Carter proposed formation of a central authority, a Metropolitan Library Commission, to be composed of a delegate from each of the four main libraries, a Catholic representative to administer the parish plan, a provincially appointed member and a professional librarian appointed by the Quebec Library Association. Individual boards of the four libraries would continue to function and to decide matters relevant to the operation of each library within its functions in the overall library system. Commission decisions pertaining to the entire system would then be better coordinated. Carter concluded optimistically, "there is reason to suppose that regional library cooperation entered into voluntarily by the existing public and parish libraries should not be difficult to accomplish." Regional libraries were already in operation in Canada and cooperative schemes were successful in reaching many unserved or underserved areas.

Duncan Carter's proposals for metropolitan library service were an important instance of planning in Canadian library history to improve services and provide more equitable access for the public. A summary 25-page version of her work was published in 1945 by the University of Chicago Graduate Library School. Like many potential planning documents, however, it was destined to gather dust and be forgotten in the course of time. Carter's subsequent career in the United States, at USC, as a cultural attaché with the US Embassy in Cairo, author and faculty member of library science at the University of Michigan (1956-66) removed her from ongoing activity in Montreal. The opportunity to explore regional cooperation passed as postwar priorities unfolded. The idea of metropolitan planning would reappear later in Toronto in the 1950s with the formation of a Council of Library Trustees of Toronto and District which hired Dr. Ralph Shaw to study the greater Toronto area in a landmark 1960 report, Libraries of Metropolitan Toronto.

The Quebec Library Association by Peter F. McNally and Rosemary Cochrane (2009)

Quebec Library Association: An Historical Overview, 1932–2007 = L’Association des bibliothécaires de Québec: un survoi historique, 1932-2007 by Peter F. McNally and Rosemary Cochrane. Montreal: Association des bibliothécaires de Québec. 2009. Cdn $20.00 (Canada); $25.00 (US); $30.00 (rest of world, including postage). ISBN: 09697803.

       Anniversaries are often the occasion for retrospective histories. For the 75th birthday of ABQLA a project was struck to document ABQLA’s activities since 1932 under the authorship of Peter McNally and Rosemary Cochrane. In a brief 30 pages, they have distilled the highlights of this regional library association's life. Anyone interested in ABQLA’s past will find this a useful starting point for facts, sources, and historical periodization.

        Born in the years of the Great Depression after efforts to establish a Canadian organization for libraries and librarians faltered, ABQLA realized positive results from the depression-era bywords “co-operative efforts” where others failed. ABQLA had the advantage of a membership base in Canada’s largest urban centre, the city of Montreal. From the outset, the association functioned on a bilingual basis and participated in Canada’s first major regional (perhaps even national) library meetings at Ottawa and Montreal in 1937 and 1939 before WW II ended these interprovincial opportunities.

        As a provincial organization largely based in Montreal, ABQLA often has found it difficult to address many issues of library development in Quebec. Library service to the public, universities and colleges, schools, and special libraries all had their own diverse qualities and governance issues that made coordination difficult. On a national scale, ABQLA members helped with the creation of the Canadian Library Association in 1946 and throughout the fifties and sixties promoted the concept of a national library in Ottawa.

        After the Quiet Revolution and the economic downturn of the early 1970s, ABQLA’s regional prominence came under challenge from many new groups within Quebec. After its 50th anniversary, ABQLA experienced membership problems but continued to encourage library education and organized smaller, successful annual meetings. At Montreal, at the Canadian Library Association conference in 1991, ABQLA hosted a provincial coordinating group, the Provincial, Regional and Territorial Libraries Association. In the age of the Internet, of course, the association launched a website to better maintain contact with its members.

        In the new millennium, ABQLA’s membership base remains less than 200 persons. It might be said after reading McNally’s and Cochrane’s work that ABQLA’s accomplishments far outweigh what one might expect from a small group. However, it could also be said that ABQLA has succeeded in maintaining libraries in the provincial spotlight because its executive and membership did not lack for enthusiasm, ingenuity, or united action in putting their concerns before the public and government departments that have increasing supported library progress across the province in the past half-century.

        While one might quibble about the brevity of this history, a library historian might rightfully pose the question: what other Canadian library association has an up-to-date account of its life? Enough said . . .

        Some might consider this book a typical institutional library history that charts it way through the course of the twentieth century without much regard to social, political, or economic currents that shaped Canada and Quebec. Others might regret the lack of a cultural studies perspective -- where does ABQLA stand in the "modernity project" cultural theorists and historians speak about? or has ABQLA been able to transcend its origin and make the passage to the "postmodern condition?" These are important questions, but lacking a basic framework that this overview provides they are best set aside until further research can be conducted. In fact, ABQLA's programs, membership patterns, and changing structures show us that "people can make history" and that the differentiated provincial landscapes of public library history--the multiple regional histories that make up the heart of the Canadian public library history--are essential to understanding how public library systems developed in Canada. Without regional contexts--the associations, librarians, library "systems," etc.--the broader national history of public libraries cannot be researched and written.

Originally posted in 2010