Canadian Library History Blog

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 Role of Canadian Public Libraries in Adult Education , by J. W. Gordon Gourlay. University of Michigan, Department of Library Science, 1942. x, 153 leaves. The studies of the 1930s on Canadian public libraries were mostly financed by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Very little funding came from government sources. In the 1940s, more academic studies on Canadian libraries began to be conducted. Some of these were regional or local studies; others explored trends that extended across provincial boundaries. Adult education concerns had emerged as an important area for library work, first in the USA in the 1920s, then in Canada during the 1930s. William Carson, the Ontario Inspector of Public Libraries, had contributed a piece to an American Library Association study, Libraries and Adult Education , published in 1926. More than a decade later, the British Columbia Library Commission issued its Preliminary Study of Adult Education in British Columbia, 1941 . Shortly after, in 19...

Duncan McCue begins hosting the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio One's call-in show, Cross Country Checkup , on a regular basis at the start of August 2016. This popular show has been on the air for more than fifty years. Longtime commentator and author, Rex Murphy, hosted this show for more than twenty years. He often scheduled programs and issues related to books, reading, and libraries in a lively debate mode from the mid-1990s to 2015. I had the opportunity to be interviewed by Mr. Murphy way back in March 1995 when the future of libraries and books, seemingly overwhelmed in the coming age of the Internet, was often questioned. Could libraries stay relevant in the age of the Information Highway? Would they wither away and leave half-empty buildings behind, or even disappear? Could they transition to Virtual Libraries - Libraries Without Walls - Electronic Libraries - Digital Libraries, whatever they might be called in the 21st century? Robert Fulford spoke on the...

Library Science for Canadians , Beatrice Welling and Catherine Campbell. Toronto: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons Ltd., 1936.  xi, 151 p., illus., index. Three editions to 1958. 'Library Science' became an emerging field of study in Canada in the 1930s linked with formal professional education of librarians and with patrons who used libraries on a regular basis. In universities there were two streams of development: library instruction (user education) and library education (professional training) that sometimes intertwined. The historiography of Canadian library science has mostly been devoted to the creation of library schools for training and educational achievement in this period, especially McGill and Toronto. In the 1930s, both McGill and Toronto began to issue Bachelor of Library Science (BLS) degrees which were accredited by the American Library Association. But another thread, library science courses for students with academic credit at the undergraduate level, has an i...

Library banner for 50th anniversary As the National Library of Canada (NLC) moved inexorably to its golden anniversary in 2003, it was still a viable institution despite years of cutback management. In line with neoliberal philosophy, services had been reduced or eliminated (e.g. the popular Multilingual service) but many basic functions remained that made it a recognizable national entity. Although it was aging technology, AMICUS, Canada's national bibliographic database, contained 25,000,000 records for more than 1,000 Canadian libraries. The NLC's Union Catalogue was a reliable source for bibliographic information and library locations for books and periodicals that could be used by other libraries for interloan. The NLC's comprehensive Canadiana collection was largely due to Legal Deposit Provisions whereby Canadian publishers were required by law to send, as a general rule, two copies of all published works in various formats. The Library's Canadian Cataloging in P...

By the time Guy Sylvestre retired at the end of 1983, many ideas crafted in the Future of the National Library (published in 1979) were no longer achievable. In the early 1980s, Canadian political and social life was in a state of flux. The election of a Conservative federal government in 1984 was a harbinger of fiscal restraint in public spending. In western nations the welfare state, often associated with Keynesian economics, had reached its apogee. The era of neoliberal economic reforms, also embraced often by neoconservatives such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, had arrived. For the majority of people, including librarians, this critical change in political decision making was at first slowly perceived. But, by the time Bill Clinton's campaign slogan, "It's the economy, stupid!", helped him win the 1992 American Presidential election, everyone began to realize that market issues trumped social and cultural issues in North America. The success of the Refo...

Report on Canadian Libraries, 1941 , 81 p. Originally unpublished with three appendices, index, letter of transmission, and schedule of Canadian travel by Charles F. McCombs, New York Public Library, on behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation. Reprinted photographically with extensive commentary by William J. Buxton and Charles R. Acland, Philanthropy and Canadian Libraries: The Politics of Knowledge and Information Montreal: Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, and The Centre for Research on Canadian Cultural Industries and Institutions, McGill University, 1998. 51 and 88 p. The Rockefeller Foundation and Canadian Libraries The Charles Flowers McCombs Report was the last of many American philanthropic studies focused on Canada begun in the 1930s. It was undertaken in 1941 to discover if further assistance might enable Canadian libraries to work with American institutions, especially the Rockefeller Foundation (RF), which previously had not been active on Canada's li...