History
The Calgary Public Library Board of Trustees was established on May 18, 1908. R. B. Bennett, who would later serve as Prime Minister of Canada, was among the five people appointed to the board. The first public library opened on January 2, 1912, thanks in part to the generosity of American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.
Carnegie funded $80,000 of the $100,000 cost of Calgary’s Central Library, (now renamed the Memorial Park Branch), pressuring City Hall to fund the rest.
The building was the first purpose-built public library in Alberta. It was designed by Boston architects McLean & Wright, and built out of local Paskapoo Sandstone (a soft stone that today presents a substantial preservation challenge). This library branch is a copy of a library in Attleboro, Massachusetts.
In 1929 the formal Victorian-style park surrounding the Central Library was dedicated to the honour of those who had died in the Great War. During construction of the original building, the Calgary Library Board sought out a librarian to oversee the opening of its new library. In January 1911, Alexander Calhoun, a thirty-one-year-old graduate of Queens University, was appointed Calgary's Librarian. Calhoun served as the head of the Calgary Public Library until his retirement in 1945.
When a new downtown central library was constructed in the early 1960s, the original branch was renamed the Memorial Park branch, and still operates today. An addition to the 1960s Central Library was built in 1974, doubling the size of the building.
Today, the current Central Library building is considered too small to meet the needs of Calgary's population, and lacks the infrastructure to support new technology. Preliminary planning and public consultation for a new central library have been completed, but funding for the project, expected to cost between C$225 million and C$250 million, is still being studied further. City Hall has pledged C$175 million to the project. The groundbreaking for the project was slated for 2012. The location of the new library will be in the Downtown East Village (just across 3rd St. S.E. from the new City Hall). However, an update from City Hall has stated that the groundbreaking is delayed, until the general details of the project can be finalized.
Read more about this topic: Calgary Public Library
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“As I am, so shall I associate, and so shall I act; Caesar’s history will paint out Caesar.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.
In Beverly Hills ... they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.”
—Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)