Readings in Canadian Library History 2 ed. by Peter F. McNally (review)

HUMANITIES 231 Peter F. McNally, editor. Readings in Canadian Library History 2. Canadian Library Association. 40 7. $59.95 This third collection of essays edited by Peter McNally for the Library History Interest Group of the Canadian Library Association sustains McNally's eloquent defence of the field: 'Mapping the mind of the human past, in Canada or elsewhere,' he contends, 'demands that we understand the vagaries of fortune that have affected the single most important institution yet devised for storing, organizing, and making accessible the graphic records of human experience.' McNally himself surveys and evaluates the literature of both English and French Canadian library history to 1964 and from 1985. to 1991, complementing his earlier review of the period 1964 to 1984 (Readings in Canadian Library History, 1986). Noting the mature vitality of Canadian library history in recent years, he contrasts the continuing French focus on histoire du livre with the varied cultural contextualizations in English studies. A full appreciation ofhistoriographical links between libraries and Canadian history in general, he concludes, is yet to be achieved. In 'Fanfares and Celebrations: Anniversaries in Canadian Graduate Education for Library and Information Studies,' McNally traces the development of Canadals seven programs, from McGillIs beginnings in 1904 to the first Canadian doctorate offered by the University ofToronto in 1971. While recognizing the strong influence of American practice (e.g., the adoption of the 'academic model' over the apprenticeship approach initially favoured in Britain and France), McNally cites as evidence of 'a typically Canadian approach of providing a framework for development rather than relying upon Wlplanned growth and proliferation' the fact that CanadaIS development of 'one of the world's great library systemsI benefited from the leadership 'provided by its graduate library schools. Elizabeth Hanson also points to u.s. influence on pedagogy and curriculum in her discussion of IEarly Canadian Library Education: The McGill and Ontario Experience, 1904-1927,' while Robert E. Brundin's account of the career of Sydney B. Mitchell, founder of the School of Librarianship at Berkeley, provides an example of Canadian influence on librarianship in the United States. Lome D. Bruce's study of 'The Aims of the Public Library Movement in Late Victorian Ontario' perhaps most obviously supports the claim that library history is important social history. In 'Local Government and Library Boards in Ontario, 1882-1945,' Bruce tracks the philosophy and structures that ensured library governing bodies a measure of mdependence from municipal authorities. The history of public libraries is further advanced by Elizabeth Mitchell's study of Belleville, Ontario, where the Mechanics' !nstituteevolved into theCorby Public Library (1851-1908),and an account by Marcel Lajeunesse of the controversial creation of the 232 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Montreal Public Library (19°1-17), when Quebec remained 'outside the continental trend known as the IJpublic Library Movement." , Claire England's engrossing history of fires in Canadian libraries, though appalling in its chronicle of waste, is not totally disheartening, as when Bishop Strachan extracted regrets and the return of two boxes of books from an American naval commander whose men had pillaged the legislative library of Upper Canada in 1813, or when more than one library rose from its ashes as a superior being - the polygon Gothic parliamentary library in Ottawa, the University of Toronto's 'first building designed as a separatelibrary.' Other 'Diverse Perspectives1 are BertrurnH. MacDonald's case study of the Library of the Natural History Society of Montreal (1827-1925), Maxine K. Rochester's analysis of the Carnegie Corporation's successful (though tainted, some thought, by cultural imperialism) effort to bring libraries to rural Canada in the 19305, and an account by Charles R. Acland and William J. Buxton of the neglected 1941 survey of research collections in Canadian libraries made by New York Public Librarian Charles F. McComb for the Rockefeller Foundation. The politics of library philanthropy are nowhere more powerfully manifest than in the history of JOM Ross Robertson's gift of 'the foremost collection of visual Canadiana' to the Toronto Public Library (1885-1929)1 recotmted here by Darrel R. Reid, and Faith Wallis's description of the impact of W.W. Francis's intense personal attachment to his cousin, Sir William Osler, on...