October Wrap Up

October is now over! Here is an update on what we did this month, and some upcoming events.

Toronto Tour

October was a lot of planning, as we needed to organize our Toronto Tour. We decided to visit the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, the Legislative Library and the CBC News Archives.
Here are some of the highlights of our tours:

Thomas Fisher Library
The Thomas Fisher Library is always a delight to visit. Our tour guide always finds great new items to show us. This time they included some of Leonard Cohen's notebooks, an example of cross-hitching, a book that was re-bound with beautiful materials and designs, as well as a 1000 year old bible!
Here are some pictures that we took on our tour:

 

Legislative Assembly

Visiting the Legislative Assembly was fascinating - their stacks were not all that impressive, but their job was very different from a traditional librarian. The legislative library is almost a library for librarians, as the patrons request reports that the librarians put together. In fact, the patrons very rarely use the stacks, and the librarians are the ones to look for the information. 

Some of the fun facts we learned that day: neutrality is very important to work at the Legislative Library which means that the librarians cannot have been affiliated with a political party before working there. Other fun facts include the newspaper clippings that librarians pass out to the member of the legislature in paper format (!!), and the fact that the library has suffered multiple fires before finding its place in the current building. 

We didn't take many pictures of the holdings, but we had a cool name pass that I took a picture of: 

CBC News Archives

CBC Archives is like a futuristic dream - their digitization process is on such a large scale that it is difficult to grasp. The coolest thing is the storage robot that pulls tapes as they are requested in the news room. 

We also visited the news room, their studios, and the film archives. Their building is as large as multiple football fields which is very impressive. 

Archive Space Robot

Archive Space Robot #2

Film studios

What's next? 

We are planning a fundraiser here on campus for the first full week of November (see the poster below).

Coming up, we also have guest speaker Sarah McCabe coming to talk to us about her work at the Ontario Historical Society at the end of November (Nov. 23). 

 Stay tuned for more details, coming soon. 

Don't hesitate to let us know if you want more details about what we're up to! You can contact us by email or simply come to our meetings.

Stay tuned to this page for updates!

thanks
SLA exec