After you pass through the doors of the Library of Parliament, your eyes are drawn to the alcoves near the entrance, where you can’t help but notice that two of the alcove walls are lined with small wooden drawers. At one time, these drawers held the Library’s card catalogue. Today the catalogue is online, but its history stretches back to the creation of the legislative assemblies of Upper and Lower Canada in 1791, before Canada was even formed.
In the early 19th century, the Library had several large printed and manuscript catalogues. They were placed on tables in the consultation room and contained the titles of all the books in its collection. They were updated each time new books were acquired and had to be regularly reorganized and rebound. To make it easier to do searches, the Library also printed indexes. The book titles were alphabetized by subject and by author and cross-referenced to the pages in the catalogue.
Around 1894, aware that the catalogue’s various volumes would be difficult to maintain, the librarians began to gradually introduce a card catalogue system. Transcribing the catalogue index onto typed index cards and finetuning the system took several decades, up until the 1950s.
In the late 1970s, the Library began automating its search tools and systems. It computerized its catalogue and installed terminals in the Main Library to provide users with access to more than 100 information databases. The catalogue was also searchable on microfiche. The new bilingual computerized catalogue meant that, a few years later, the card-based system was abandoned for good.
With the arrival of the Internet in the 1990s, the Library catalogue moved online. Today, the Library has a next-generation computerized catalogue that allows users to quickly and easily access its vast collection of materials and other resources that the Library has access to.
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