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...

Ontario library class, 1980s A New Vision for Teacher-Librarians in the 1980s The growth of elementary and secondary schools for two decades after 1960 led to the rapid development of school library facilities, improved collections, and qualified staffing on an unprecedented scale. Statistics Canada reported in 1979 that 72 percent of Canadian schools operated a centralized library (8,201) serving 85 percent of the total school population (3,698,512). However, only 47 percent of these schools had a full-time professional librarian/media professional due to the large number of rural and smaller schools. Total staffing was reported as 5,171: there were 451 professional librarians, 3,390 other professionals, and 1,330 support staff. The average material expenditure per secondary school library was about three times larger than that per elementary school library. Throughout this thriving period, school librarianship had entailed the promotion of a general model program based on the rol...

Education for School Librarianship in Canada; Proceedings of a Workshop, Jasper Park Lodge, Alberta on Saturday, 8 June 1968 . Sponsored by the Canadian School Library Association, Alberta School Library Council, and Saskatchewan Association of School Librarians. Ottawa: Canadian Library Association, 1970. 69 p. Stylized 1960s media centre classroom During the affluent 1960s, most new school buildings included a library resource centre, a term that referred to a service focusing on multimedia resources. Renovations and expansions of existing buildings modernized school libraries with enlarged, better equipped centralized spaces and resources. It was an era of progress. Schools were employing multimedia resources at both elementary and secondary levels, increasing budgets for printed resources, and improving training for professional, para-professional and clerical staff to provide services to students and teachers. In 1967, the Dominion Bureau of Statistics reported there were 16.3 mi...

Munson, Amelia H., ed. Books for Youth: Everyone’s Responsibility; School Library Institute Proceedings, June 24–25, 1949, Winnipeg, Manitoba . Ottawa: Canadian Library Association, 1949. 61 p. [The Institute was part of the fourth annual conference of the Canadian Library Association]  School Library Development in Postwar Canada, 1945–50 Attention to school library work and better cooperation between public libraries and schools increased after the Second World War. While many libraries in secondary schools were satisfactory and there were a few outstanding ones, small classroom collections prevailed in elementary schools. For example, at a rural school in Brechin just outside Nanaimo, British Columbia, each classroom featured a small library with books supplied by the Vancouver Island Union Library. Teachers frequently were in charge of these collections, although a few trained teacher-librarians supervised activities in some places. Larger public libraries, such as ...