Goodbye Canadiana...
I work in an amazing setting ...at least I did until yesterday. We closed our doors to the public on Saturday April 31, 2016 officially, and unofficially we were open for one more day - Sunday May 1.
This beautiful place housed thousands of rare and fragile items that cannot be replaced anytime soon. Many of them are going to another location and will be used there, but no one could ever replace the area in our department where most of our materials were shelved - we called it the Canadiana Stacks Collection. There in the Stacks, we worked in the quietude of thousands of conserved rare items - adding them to the collection, repairing them - sometimes discussing in detail the more interesting of them between ourselves. What to do with a Land Grant - How to catalogue the signed version of Margaret Atwood's "Cat's Eye", or what the best way might be to conserve (archivally protect) some original art prints by Emily Carr and edited by Doris Shadbolt. We delighted in this collection that took over 50 years to amass...We shared a kind of wonderful cameraderie as "library church mice", working under the gently humming lights into the later hours of the evening at times - and then locking our precious items up for the night - every night.
We in Canadiana had opportunities to work in a "special" library collection that few information people would even dream of .. it was exhilerating and inspiring for me as a library worker - and certainly as an artist - to be a part of the Canadiana Dept.
Like the others who were my teammates, I will never for get my years here.
This beautiful place housed thousands of rare and fragile items that cannot be replaced anytime soon. Many of them are going to another location and will be used there, but no one could ever replace the area in our department where most of our materials were shelved - we called it the Canadiana Stacks Collection. There in the Stacks, we worked in the quietude of thousands of conserved rare items - adding them to the collection, repairing them - sometimes discussing in detail the more interesting of them between ourselves. What to do with a Land Grant - How to catalogue the signed version of Margaret Atwood's "Cat's Eye", or what the best way might be to conserve (archivally protect) some original art prints by Emily Carr and edited by Doris Shadbolt. We delighted in this collection that took over 50 years to amass...We shared a kind of wonderful cameraderie as "library church mice", working under the gently humming lights into the later hours of the evening at times - and then locking our precious items up for the night - every night.
We in Canadiana had opportunities to work in a "special" library collection that few information people would even dream of .. it was exhilerating and inspiring for me as a library worker - and certainly as an artist - to be a part of the Canadiana Dept.
Like the others who were my teammates, I will never for get my years here.
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