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The Inter-War Years: Growth amid Depression and Disappointment

Although the inter-war years witnessed straitened provincial finances, the University’s curriculum and library resources continued to grow, as did student enrollments, which rebounded to 1106 in 1919–1920; staff numbered 100. Although the University’s operating budget leaped from under $500,000 in 1919 to more than $750,000 the following year, fluctuating revenues throughout the 1920s imposed an ongoing building moratorium, which affected The Rev. Mr Donald Ewing Cameron (1879–1946), whom Tory had named University Librarian in May 1921 to replace Bowers. Thus a chronic shortage of space presented Cameron with his greatest challenge during his 24 years as University Librarian. Additions to the curriculum—in 1921, agricultural engineering and public health nursing, in 1924 the School of Nursing—did not make his job easier.

Cameron moved quickly to address the Library’s dual shortages of money and space. In 1922 he succeeded in implementing an annual student library fee of $5 to generate a guaranteed annual budget for acquisition of books, and he established the right to retain and carry forward any unspent balances from one fiscal year to the next. The student library fee continued to be collected until 1958. To supplement the limited study space available in the Library, Cameron opened satellite reading rooms; medical and agricultural reading rooms were opened in 1922, and a law reading room in 1923.

Students appear to have accepted the need for a library fee: “Since the library fee has been imposed, there seems to be no special need to point out to students that we have a Library; it has become one of the things that thrust themselves even on the most shrinking student,” wrote the editor of The Gateway on October 17, 1922. He “hoped…students will be stimulated to make enough use of the Library to turn the fee into a sound investment. As the demand grows, increased service will be given; there is pleasure in doing more for students that want to read.” Unwilling to leave this totally to chance, the editor had been “haunting the librarian’s office…[and] propounded his great idea. The Library should advertise. Every student should know that we have such a thing as a Library, and should use it regularly.…Would the librarian help, perhaps by writing a bit in The Gateway about it?” The editor went on to encourage students to become acquainted with the Library and its 25,000 volumes, counselled “good citizenship” in their use, and warned that infractions of the Library’s rules would be reported to the Provost.

The editor’s “great idea” led Cameron to publish an appeal in The Gateway on October 9, 1923: “Librarian Urges You to Use Books: 26,000 Volumes at Your Service. The staff of the University invites all students to make full use of the Library during the term. According to the wisdom of the old hands, it pays to begin as early as possible; books are not always to be had, when too many put off asking for them till the last minute.” Cameron went on to urge students not to “hesitate to consult the library staff, which will do all it can to help you. This means anything the library can do for you, short of allowing you to fill your fountain pen out of our ink bottle.” He concluded: “Use the Library to the full, but do not abuse it or its books. Remember that others want the books as well as you. Don’t shake your fountain pen in the library. Don’t mark the books. We do not desire to put a plaster on your caution money, but we don’t shrink from the idea. You have to pay a library fee. We shall try to give you value for it, but it is up to you to get it. D.E. Cameron, Librarian.”

In 1922–1923 the Library was open daily from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with extended hours from 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. five nights a week. Because study space remained at a premium, the Library was generally filled to capacity, and students took maximum advantage of evening hours, as Cameron noted in his annual report for 1924. The expanding curriculum in the professional schools and growing enrollments necessitated purchase of duplicate copies of many titles. The Library was lending about 25,000 books a year. Crowded conditions prevailed in the Library throughout the 1920s. As stop-gaps, Cameron recommended further dispersal of books to departmental libraries and extension of evening hours.

Donald Cameron was appointed at a time when the heads of academic libraries were drawn from the ranks of scholars, without formal training as librarians. By the 1930s, though, attendance at a library school was required of everyone joining the library staff. The few staff members were scarcely sufficient to provide service coverage. When illness sidelined Cameron for several months in 1930, the pressure on them became even more intense, as they laboured to spend a $3,000 grant awarded to the English Department by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. In contrast to that sum, from time to time, Cameron found his budget for acquisitions appropriated. Early in his tenure, during his absence from the campus, Dr Tory approved purchase of a set of scientific texts that absorbed that year’s entire book budget, while yet another year’s acquisitions budget was expended in the purchase of law books and reports. In addition, other building priorities claimed what little capital funding was available to the University. However, 1928 proved to be a watershed. In that year, the University established a School of Education and assumed control over training of the Province’s teachers; the Edmonton Academy of Medicine transferred its medical library to the University, which thereby assumed responsibility for providing information services to medical practitioners throughout Alberta; Dr Tory left the University; and the Library’s collection surpassed 30,000 volumes. Clearly, a tipping point had been reached.

Tory’s successor, Dr Robert Charles Wallace, became President in fall term, 1928, and was immediately confronted by a critical shortage of space, most particularly library space, a deficiency highlighted by Donald Cameron in his annual reports. Wallace, in his 1929 report, agreed that a library building must be the University’s number one capital building priority. The following year, Wallace returned to the same theme, but the global economic depression was unrelenting. Nonetheless, Cameron undertook a tour in the summer of 1931 to visit larger libraries in the East and to study the latest developments in buildings and administration. Less optimistically, on December 5, 1929, a satirical chronology by Larry Alexander was published in The Gateway, which accurately predicted that no library would be built for many years to come:

1930 Government promises new library building. 1933 Government considers plans for new library….1935 Foundations for new library building commenced….1939 Plans for new library building revised….1943 Government says library will be ready next year….1946 Government says library will be ready next year….1948…Government says library will be ready next year.…1950…Work on library building suspended.

On October 16, 1934, an editorial in The Gateway offered a more positive view: “The students of this University are exceptionally fortunate in the libraries which are at their disposal.…We can not boast of the number of volumes we have access to or the variety, but for those who do not specialize the facilities are quite satisfactory.”

Although overcrowding in the Library was the most chronic source of complaint, and was regularly highlighted in the annual reports of the President and the University Librarian, other matters also drew criticism from the student body, whether it was professors monopolizing current issues of periodicals or the decision taken at the beginning of 1936 to close the Library’s bookstacks to all undergraduates, except those reading for honours. In a page-length editorial on February 11, 1936 headed “WE PROTEST,” The Gateway’s editors argued that, although the new rule meant “less wear and tear on the books, a smaller number are lost, and the stacks are undoubtedly tidier,” the sacrifice was too great to bear. This restriction of access to the stacks was primarily driven by the need to add more shelving to the stack room at the expense of potential study space.

Pressured by declining revenues as the world-wide depression deepened and beggared prairie farmers, the Provincial Government cut the University’s annual operating budget over a two-year period from $588,388 to $375,000. Thankfully, the $5 student library fee kept the book budget relatively constant, so that by 1932 the collection had grown to 45,085 volumes. Then, in 1932, when the fortunes of both the University and the Library appeared bleakest, the Carnegie Corporation provided a grant of $15,000 over three years for book purchases. Cameron could barely restrain his excitement, particularly since the focus was to be on books for the Faculty of Arts.

In The Gateway on December 6, 1935, Cameron credited the student library fee and the generosity of the Carnegie Corporation for growth to 55,000 volumes and 500 periodicals. Cameron went on to praise the “co-operative habits” of libraries in providing inter-library loans to smaller institutions, and to describe the exciting new technology of microfilm photography. When asked about career opportunities in librarianship, Cameron observed that “An all-around live interest is the important thing, on top of a generous education.” While noting a shortage of male librarians, he dismissed the notion of creating a library school at the University: “The constituency is too small. The number of students taking library work annually in Canada [is] about fifty, and McGill and Toronto adequately cover those.” A year later, on December 17, 1936, Gateway reporter Murray Bolton praised the University for its library, “whose sole aim is the advancement of learning and the giving of an opportunity to those whose minds and eyes rest on the horizon rather than in the mud underfoot.…” He even found a virtue of convenience in the existence of six separate library branches—Main, Law, Medicine, Chemistry, Agriculture, and Education—before turning to the deficiencies of, “that stuffy room in the Arts Building,” followed by a plea for a new library building. By 1939, Library accessions totalled 67,082. Clearly, the continued lack of a proper library building meant that ever-more auxiliary storage space had to be found; thus, more of the books and bound periodicals in low demand were stored in an underground passage known as “the wind tunnel.” Yet in a sparsely populated and impoverished prairie province, the University Library, for all its deficiencies, offered a passport to the wider world.