Canadian Library History Blog

 The Revival of School Libraries before 1920 In the mid-19th century four eastern Canadian provinces—Ontario, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick—established district school libraries which, like their American counterparts, eventually fell into disuse. One principal cause of their failure was that they were not sufficiently geared towards the educational needs of students. In the United States, municipal public libraries took the lead in providing reading resources for children, leaving schools to rely on small, inadequate classroom collections and standard textbooks. Of course, the issue of appropriate libraries for students continued to be discussed among educators. In 1902, the Ontario Department of Education introduced a matching provincial grant for rural school library books, allowing participating schools to receive up to $10 in matching funds based on local purchases. Two years later, the Deputy Minister of Education, John Millar, reported at the Ontario E...

On the grounds of the Niagara Historical Society and Museum in the Town of Niagara-on-the-Lake there is a familiar Ontario Heritage Trust plaque erected in 1984 commemorating the contributions of a respected local woman, Janet Carnochan. Janet Carnochan, n.d. For more than thirty years Janet Carnochan, a native of Stamford, Ontario, taught elementary and secondary school at Niagara-on-the Lake, but she made her greatest contribution to the community as a historian rather than as an educator. A distinguished historical preservationist, Carnochan founded and was first president of the Niagara Historical Society, 1895-1925, and laboured tirelessly to safeguard and promote the rich heritage of Niagara. She wrote and edited numerous historical works including the History of Niagara and successfully campaigned for the construction of Memorial Hall, the first building erected for the purpose of a museum in Ontario. In 1949, when the town's former high school was incorporated into this ...

The Town of York was founded in 1793 by Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe as the capital of Upper Canada. York replaced Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake), the capital from 1791-93. The town was an established frontier trading site with indigenous people and possessed a good harbour for transport and farmland that attracted settlers. About 1,000 people—settlers, traders, officials, and soldiers—populated the settlement in 1800. With increasing growth over the next quarter century, York became the centre of Ontario government, business, and cultural life. It was renamed Toronto in 1830 in recognition of its indigenous roots and incorporated as a small city in 1834 with a population of about 9,000. Books and the value of literacy in a colonial setting were important elements of cultural life fostered by the Upper Canadian elite—Loyalists, government and church officials, wealthy merchants and investors, and emerging career professionals such as lawyers and doctors. Jointly, this conserv...

Canada was a pioneer in the development of radio. As early as May 1920, the Montreal station XWA (later CFCF) went on the air delivering a short concert broadcast to an audience as far away as Ottawa. Listeners initially utilized crystal sets, simple radio receivers. Eventually, these devices were superseded by many types of vacuum tube receivers that became standard consumer purchases as less expensive tabletop models were sold by the 1930s. Even so, Canadian audiences were largely confined to major cities before the electrification of rural areas. For most of the 1920s, there were few Canadian stations and radio enthusiasts along the southern border, especially in Ontario, who often listened to American stations, such as KDKA in Pittsburgh, which began operating at the end of 1920. This station offered library storytelling for children, such as popular short fairy tales and animal stories. The Golden Age of Radio and Libraries In 2008, at the Ontario Library Association Super Conf...

The ‘Library Faith’ in Books, Reading, and Democracy A longstanding belief in the positive influence of the public library in 20th-century North American librarianship was encapsulated in the short term, ‘the library faith,’ a visionary construct best summarized and articulated in an examination of public library service commissioned by the American Library Association (ALA), the Public Library Inquiry, which published its research from 1947 to 1952. The Inquiry developed this descriptive model of prevailing beliefs guiding the evolution of public libraries to understand and interpret the past in a structured way. Modelling can be helpful in identifying central ideas, beliefs, and opinions during an era when a prevailing consensus exists within a conceptual framework. The extensive Inquiry study noted that librarians, indeed, many educators and political leaders, believed in the beneficent power of books and reading. Reading was regarded as a crucial element in personal growth and full...