Canadian Library History Blog

Hugh Hornby Langton was the Registrar of the University of Toronto from 1887 to 1892 and served as its University Librarian from 1892 to 1923. He was also an accomplished editor, translator, and historian. His most important contribution to the University was his reestablishment of the collections, staffing, and services after a fire on Valentine's Day in 1890 destroyed the original library in the east wing of University College. Langton took charge of a new standalone library which opened on King's College Circle in 1892. This building featured new innovations such as electric lighting, steam heating, and a fireproof bookstack. In 1911, he oversaw the completion of a new wing to provide more space for the library.   Hugh Langton became a mainstay in campus academic life for three decades in his role as librarian and the main editor of the university's scholarly publishing program from 1897 to 1923 and the launch of the Canadian Historical Review in 1920. He contributed hi...

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...

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...

College and university education evolved slowly in the Canadian Maritime provinces before 1900. By the time of the First World War, Dalhousie was the most prominent university in the region. Established in Halifax in 1818, it began to expand after 1911 when it relocated to the more spacious Studley campus where much-needed new buildings could be constructed. By this time, two other smaller, distinguished liberal arts universities had also gained prominence: Acadia in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and Mount Allison in Sackville, New Brunswick. Acadia was established in 1838 and began to grow in the early 20th century. Mount Allison, founded in 1839, was noted for being the first university in the British Empire to award a bachelor’s degree to a woman as early as 1875. Collections at all three institutions were relatively small. When James Bain reviewed library progress across Canada in 1895, he reported that Dalhousie (college) held 20,000 volumes, Mount Allison held 4,500 volum...

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, including returning war veterans, overcrowding at three Prairie universities led to development plans to transfer and consolidate library collections from various academic buildings into a separate, central library. 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 increasing pressure to develop rese...

Over the course of twenty years, in the 1950s and 1960s, libraries at the University of Toronto continued to expand and improve as they became collectively the most extensive university holdings in Canada. The library system, under the leadership of Robert Blackburn, also refined its philosophy concerning the necessity for a centralized research collection to serve the needs of graduate studies. During this period, the architectural styles of the Modern Movement and new construction technologies utilizing steel, glass, and concrete also broke with past practices. In 1954, the Sigmund Samuel Library (SSL) was constructed using Queenston limestone adjacent to the original library building with the Samuel family crest above the entrance. The coat of arms in stained glass above the entrance had been granted to the Samuel family by Oliver Cromwell in 1670. When the John P. Robarts Research Library was completed in 1973, the humanities and social science collection was transferred to the new...

Resources of Canadian University Libraries for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Report of a Survey for the National Conference of Canadian Universities and Colleges , by Edwin E. Williams. Ottawa: National Conference of Canadian Universities and Colleges, November 1962. 87 p. Resources of Canadian Academic and Research Libraries/Ressources des Bibliothèques d’Université et de Recherche au Canada by Robert B. Downs. Ottawa: Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, 1967. 301 p. By the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, the number of full-time undergraduate and graduate university students across Canada was increasing dramatically, and provincial governments were granting new charters to several universities, such as Victoria, Calgary, Waterloo, York, Guelph, Brock, and Carleton. Additional funding for faculty, teaching staff, and buildings came from federal and provincial governments to accommodate this growth. Consequently, the expansion of libra...