Canadian Library History Blog

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...

The Books Drive On . 16 mm film, colour and sound, 1948. Produced by Jean and Glen Eckmier, photography by Bob Henry and script by Tom Rafferty from CKNX radio. Ontario libraries were late adopters of motorized bookmobile service. In the 19th century travelling library service by agencies in the UK and USA were innovative extension ideas to reach readers in unserved areas. In Canada, travelling libraries, boxes of books usually shipped to local communities or schools, were introduced first in British Columbia in 1898 by E.O.S, Scholefield, the Provincial Librarian and Archivist. In 1899, McGill University began serving areas in rural Quebec thanks to the sponsorship of Hugh McLennan. The Ontario Department of Education began its service to northern lumber camps in 1901. These systems proved so popular that they were expanded and continued for more than half a century before they were discontinued. Canadian Bookmobiles Operate from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coasts The first Canadian...

Programme for Library Development in British Columbia . Victoria, B.C.: Joint Committee on Library Policy, 1945. 36 p. maps Programme for Library Development in British Columbia, 1950: Being a Condensation and Revision of the “Programme for Library Development in British Columbia,” 1945 . Victoria, B.C: Joint Committee of the British Columbia Library Association and the Public Library Commission, 1950. 10 p. Survey of Union Libraries in British Columbia . Victoria, B.C.: British Columbia Public Library Commission, 1950. 59 p. Programme for Library Development in British Columbia, 1956 . Victoria: British Columbia Public Library Commission, 1957. 15 p. (cover illustration below) Over the course of a decade following the Second World War, British Columbia trustees, officials, and librarians sought to improve library services across the province. The provincial Public Library Commission (PLC, est. 1919), in conjunction with financing from the Carnegie Corporation, had issued two previous ...

St John, (Francis R.) Library Consultants, Inc.  Ontario Libraries: A Province-Wide Survey and Plan , 1965. Toronto: Ontario Library Association, 1965. 182 p. At the beginning of the 1960s, Ontario’s public, school, university, government, and special libraries were trying to cope with a rapidly growing population, changing technology, and staff shortages. The Department of Education had made a few incremental improvements after the Wallace Report of 1957, but leaders in the library sector expected more effective planning and financial support from Queen’s Park. When William Davis, the Conservative M.P. from Peel County, was appointed Minister of Education in 1962, the Ontario Library Association (OLA) invited him to speak at its 1963 conference. The new Minister did not disappoint: he spoke about the importance of libraries as community agents and stressed that better planning was necessary to achieve their service goals. Most importantly, he offered to finance studies sponsor...

Ontario Public Libraries: The Provincial Role in a Triad of Responsibilities. The Report of the Ontario Public Libraries Programme Review for the Minister of Citizenship and Culture . Toronto: Ministry of Citizenship and Culture, 1982. Executive Co-Ordinator, Peter J. Bassnett. Tables and appendices; xxxiii, 318 pp. In September 1980, Ontario’s Minister of Culture and Recreation (MCR), Reuben Baetz, met with the Ontario Public Library Council (OPLC) to announce a two-year Public Libraries Programme Review (OPLPR). Scarborough’s chief librarian, Peter Bassnett, would serve as director and work with a small intermediary group at the outset to plan the review process. Since 1975 he had been chief librarian at Scarborough. Before this appointment, he had managed systems at North York and worked in the UK for many years. The Minister believed that a positive approach with abundant consultation would improve the delivery of library services throughout Ontario. The 1970s had been a time of co...

Roads to Reading . 16 mm film, colour, sound, 14 minutes, 1958. Produced by the Nova Scotia Film Bureau for the Nova Scotia Provincial Library. Directed by Margaret Perry with Alberta Letts as technical advisor. Journey from Zero = La Longue Randonnée . 16 mm film, sound, colour, 13 minutes, 1961. National Film Board of Canada, Directed by Roger Blais. By 1960, regional libraries were fairly well established in Canada. The sight of a bookmobile on Canada’s rural roadways was by no means novel anymore. In Nova Scotia, where regional services had begun in earnest in the late 1940s, there were five regional systems: Cape Breton (headquarters in Sydney), Annapolis Valley, Pictou County (headquarters in New Glasgow), Colchester-East Hants (headquarters in Truro), and the Halifax City Regional Library. In 1952, Nova Scotia adopted a new library act that provided a comprehensive plan for a centralized direction and regional libraries to cover the entire province, financed to the amount ...

French language display in Algonquin region, 1969 The new 1966 Public Libraries Act formed the structure for rapid, and conflicting, developments into the mid-1980s when this act was greatly modified. This was an era of continuous change in local government at a period of time when municipal regional government replaced older county structures. Expanded provincial jurisdiction over municipalities in Ontario became common. As well, federal/provincial centennial financing--$38.7 million net cost in Ontario--became available to assist the largest construction program since the Carnegie grant era. Almost seventy public library buildings were renovated or constructed in Ontario on a cost-shared basis with municipalities. The 1966 Act modernized local board structures and funding. As well, the Act introduced quasi-independent regional library systems governed by trustees in an effort to equalize services and coordinate planning across cities, towns, older counties and districts in O...

A Regional Library and Its Readers; A Study of Five Years of Rural Reading by H. B. Chandler and J.T. Croteau. New York: American Association for Adult Education, 1940. 136 p. tables, charts, and index. When it first appeared, in 1940, after the outbreak of the Second World War, A Regional Library and Its Readers received little notice in Canadian library circles. Peacetime energies were being redirected to the nation's war effort and the establishment of military-camp libraries. An academic publication by the Director of Prince Edward Island Libraries (Henry Chandler) and a college professor (John Croteau) at Charlottetown's St. Dunstan's University surely was not cause for detailed discussion, especially if it was published in New York. It was an American review in the July 1940 issue of Library Quarterly that best recognized this innovative Canadian study's linkage of library circulation with the reading habits of rural Prince Edward Islanders and noted the tren...