Ottawa Public Library's Main Branch
The 'Ottawa Public Library' (OPL) is the
library system of
Ottawa,
Ontario,
Canada. The library was founded in
1906 with a donation from the
Carnegie Foundation.
Origin of the OPL
Prior to the twentieth century, Ottawa had a few reading rooms in hotel lobbies, and also some small fee-based libraries for working men, but no truly free place for anyone to read. The city's active Local Council of Women took up the cause of a free library for all. They announced, just before the election of
1896, that the mansion of
George Perley, a local lumber baron, was donated in his will as a home for the library. However, the city voted down the motion to build a library, as well as another motion to build a firehall; the city just didn't have any money to spare for "luxuries".
Only in 1901, when letters were mailed to
Andrew Carnegie, did they get anywhere. Carnegie replied that he would offer $100,000 to the city to build the library if they provided a site and a pledge of $7,500 a year to maintain it. They eventually agreed in January
1903, and within a few years the library was built and open to the public.
Current day
The main branch of the library is located in downtown Ottawa at the corner of Metcalfe and Laurier, at the same spot as the original Carnegie library, although nothing remains of the original building but some stained glass windows. The library now has thirty-three branches spread throughout Ottawa and the surrounding area.
Before merger (in January 1, 2001) of eleven separate municipal library systems, the Ottawa Public Library itself only had a few libraries, including Sunnyside, Rideau, and Rosemount. Today, the larger, busier library branches such as Nepean Centrepointe, Carlingwood, Main, Orleans, and Ruth E. Dickinson branches have multiple stories and act as hubs for their areas, whereas most branches are small neighborhood branches like Sunnyside, Vernon, and Carp.
Patrons throughout the new city have greatly benefitted from the 2001 merger, since they can now easily order almost any book from another branch, and return books to anywhere in the city. The new system is very
centralized, however, which has meant a loss of decision-making power in many ways, including the choice of books for purchase and the old, local ways of running the smaller libraries.
The current head of OPL is
Barbara Clubb, who was also president of the
Canadian Library Association in 2005. The OPL is governed by a board of fourteen part-time members appointed by the City of Ottawa, six city councillors and eight members of the public. The Library is funded mainly by the city through local tax revenues. Some revenue also comes from the province, and traditional library sources of fees, fines, and fundraising.
The library system has 2.4 million items, 94% percent of which are books. The library also has a large audio-visual collection including
DVDs,
CDs, and
VHS tapes. Since Ottawa has a significant francophone population, a large portion of the collection is in
French, with some branches such as
Vanier working almost exclusively in French. Smaller collections are also held in a wide array of other languages, notably
Chinese,
Hindi, and
Arabic. According to the latest Ontario library statistics, only the
Toronto Public Library has larger holdings.
The bookmobile of the
Ottawa Public Library, when it was headquartered at the Sunnyside Branch. It is now headquartered at the newly opened Greenboro District Branch, which opened in 2006.
The Library has two
bookmobiles, which operated out of the Sunnyside branch for almost 50 years, stop at regularly scheduled places throughout the city, in an effort to reach neighborhoods without library branches. Many of these neighborhoods are poorer, more remote, or for some reason slightly too far from a library branch. During a funding crisis in
2004, the older bookmobile was nearly decommissioned, but instead it was kept in service with a second, new bookmobile added in
2005. The Bookmobile headquarters was moved to the new Greenboro District Branch in June 2006.
This large new branch, the Greenboro Branch, has been built in the Greenboro area in the city's rapidly-growing South end, and opened on
June 7,
2006, replacing the Blossom Park Branch in the Blossom Park neighbourhood of the former
City of Gloucester. There have also been a number of proposals to build a new, much larger Main branch of the library somewhere downtown, including an offer which was eventually rejected by city council from a developer for partnership to build in the still-mostly-empty
Lebreton Flats, with some proposals suggesting it would be located near
Bayview Station on the
O-Train. Problems with building a new Main Branch include a lack of funding and vision and especially location, as Ottawa's downtown core is already very crowded, and Lebreton Flats is not within close walking distance of any large neighborhood or commercial district.
Branches
Trivia
★ The day after its official opening, in 1906, the original
Carnegie library opened several hours later than expected, because the mass of people who had come to the opening day left the entire library in complete disarray, and had walked off with many items.
★ The Rideau Branch of the OPL is thought to have been the first
bilingual public library branch in
North America when it opened in 1934.
★ The books at the rural Fitzroy Harbour branch, the most Westerly branch of the OPL, were subjected to an entirely unfortunate
skunk spraying in
1998.
See also
★
Ontario Public Libraries
★
Toronto Public Library
External links
★
Ottawa Public Library
★
Ontario Public Libraries
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