University Libraries

 

University libraries provide the richest source of information for students of Canadian literature. Specific sites vary, but the researcher can expect to find such resources as lists of archive and manuscript holdings--some described in considerable detail--, bibliographies, and biographies of authors. In a very few cases one can find online reproductions of books, manuscripts, photos, and paintings and one site offers reproductions of selected materials online, but these enhancements are, sadly, rare. The most thorough lists of useful links can also be found at university library sites. Such sites are helpful in the early stages of research to establish where materials are located, what library operating hours are, and what their policies are with respect to access for outsiders.

 

University of British Columbia

The UBC archives can be found at http://www.library.ubc.ca/spcoll/ubc_arch/ubc_arch.html From there you can link to an "Overview for Researchers" page which has further links on how to search for specific categories of items (photographs, cartographic materials, sound and moving image resources, etc.). The University Archives Inventories page provides links to descriptions of most of UBC's archive inventories, though some have not been converted to html yet. Writers and writing related items listed include Earle Birney , Robert Bringhurst, Canadian Literature, Roy Daniells, William Gibson, and George McWhirter.

Manuscript collections are described online at http://www. library.ubc.ca/spcoll/mss_col.html. The writers featured include Malcolm Lowry, Ethel Wilson, Roderick Haig-Brown, George Bowering, Alan Crawley, Al Purdy, and many others too numerous to list here.

Also online is Canadian Children's Books 1799-1939 compiled by Sheila A. Egoff, a list of Canadian children's books held in the Special Collections and University Archives at UBC.

 

University of Northern British Columbia

Canadian Writers: a Bio-Bibliographical Resource project contains biographical and bibliographical information about Jeanette Armstrong, Joy Kogawa, and Aritha van Herk. In each case, site author Karin Beeler has provided an author biography, a list of works by the author, and a list of works about the author. There are photos of Armstrong and Kogawa and excerpts from Beeler's article "Recreating Cassandra and Anna Karenina: Unheard Voices in Christa Wolf's Cassandra and Aritha van Herk's Places Far From Ellesmere".

UNBC also hosts the Margaret Laurence Society Home Page. It provides links to biographical and bibliographical information about Laurence. The link to the York University Archives does not work.

 

University of Calgary

The University of Calgary Library has online information about its Canadian Literary Archives. To see what Canadian literature materials the archive contains type "Canadian Literary" in the entry box next to "Search the Special Collections Pages". This will bring up a list of all their special collections in the Canadian Literary Archives. You will receive approximately 175 "hits". Choose the specific item of interest by clicking. Typing "occasional paper" will generate a list of links to 16 "Occasional Papers" which describe various aspects of their Special Collections holdings. Among these papers is a bio-critical essay on Robert Kroetsch written by Aritha van Herk.

 

University of Manitoba

St. John College's Canadian Literature Archive is one of the best Canlit resource pages on the internet. It has links to several external sites, but more importantly it provides many excellent resources developed in site. These resources include the Robert Bringhurst Bibliography, the Canadian writers of fiction for young adults page, and bibliographies for Robert Kroetsch, Eli Mandel, Michael Ondaatje, and Sinclair Ross developed by Dennis Cooley. It would be helpful for visitors to the site if its developers could somehow differentiate between links to material housed at St. John College and material housed at other web sites.

The holdings in the University of Manitoba's Canadian Prairie Literature Manuscripts archive are described online. In each case the collection is described and there is a brief rundown of the writer's career. Authors listed online are Frederick Philip Grove, Dorothy Livesay , Eli Mandel, Henry Kreisel, Margaret Avison, and John Newlove. The archive also houses the business records of Turnstone Press, Thistledown Press, and NeWest Press.

 

York University

York University has both its York University Archives Fonds Register and its list of Canadian Literary Papers in the York Archives online. The Fonds Register contains an alphabetised list, by last name or main word, of the fonds titles and their corresponding fonds numbers.

The Archives and Special Collections main page will link you to information about access, operating hours, and holdings, among other things. The page describing York's archival holdings has brief descriptions of the York University Archives, the Private Archives, the Canadiana Collection, the Canadian Literature Collection, and the Canadian Pamphlet Collection.

There is a page titled "Canadian Literary Papers in the York Archives" which has brief notes on the career of bill bissett, Norman Levine, Carol Malyon, B.W. Powe, Susan Swan, Clara Thomas, Joyce Wieland, and Adele Wiseman, writers whose papers are in the Private Archive. Unfortunately, the page has not been updated since 1996.

 

Queens University

Queen's Archives Database can be searched online by Keyword, Title, Author, or Collection name. Among the Collections you can select for searching are the Canadian Literature Collection, the Lorne Pierce Papers, and the Charles G.D. Roberts Collection. You can also combine two or more of these fields (i.e. Keyword: letter; Author bissett; Collection: Canadian Literature Collection) to define complex searches. This site uses java and displayed a pop up window full of programming codes when I visited it using Microsoft Internet Explorer. This problem did not occur when I used Netscape Navigator. It is a problem which should never arise. A very brief description of Queen's literary archive is available online.

Connecting to Queen's online library catalog can be a challenge. The preferred way to use the catalogue is via something called "tn3270" software which you must download and install on your hard drive. According to the notes on the library web site this software does not work well with newer web browsers. There is also an experimental web connection to the catalog, but you are warned that its records are incomplete and can be innacurate. And, to make matters more confusing, the tn3270 access works only between 8 am and mindnight, Kingston Ontario time. Queen's has the most user unfriendly library encountered while researching this article. There is no excuse for it.

 

Trent University

Trent University lists its Literary and Publishing Records online. Among the fonds listed are those pertaining to Canadian writers Susanna Moodie, A.J.M. Smith, W.O. Mitchell, Ernest Thompson Seton, Catherine Parr Traill, Pauline Johnson, Scott Young, Peter Gzowski, Margaret Laurence, and Wayland Drew, as well as holdings pertaining to the Canadian Forum and The Journal of Canadian Studies.

 

University of Toronto

The University of Toronto library has probably the best resource site for Canadian Poetry. Though it is geared more to the undergraduate and the general reader, the site should contain something of use to anyone interested in Canadian poetry. The main page provides links to 12 subpages, each one providing links to additional pages, some on the site and some located elsewhere. The Canadian Poets page contains links to pages which have been created for 57 contemporary poets (though I'm not sure about the contemporaneity of E.J. Pratt). Each poet's page attempts to provide a photograph, a mailing address, a brief biography, a selection of poets, a "writing philosophy," a list of published works, and "other information" (awards and a list of selected criticism of the poet's work). There are also links to selections from the works of eighteen nineteenth century Canadian poets.

The eleven other subpages are devoted to Poetry Journals and Magazines (links to 40 online Canadian Poetry magazines), Canadian literary publishers, other Canadian Poetry Pages, a feature poem (a different poem is randomly selected every time you click on this link), International Poetry Sites (links to poetry sites around the world), Literary Events (links to information about poetry readings in Canada), Literary Awards, Literary Grants, Literary Contests, Poetry Courses, and a link to Representative Poetry, an online anthology based upon a print compilation of the same name selected by members of the University of Toronto English Department and put online by Ian Lancashire.

 

McGill University

McGill has brief descriptions of its Canadian Literature Special Collections available on the web. These collections include the Ralph Gustafson Collection of Canadian Poetry, the Norman Friedman Stephen Leacock Collection, and the F.R. Scott Library. A brief description of Canadian manuscripts which the university holds in its special collections can also be found online.

 

University of New Brunswick

The UNB library archives lists several sites of interest to Canadian literature researchers: Alfred Bailey fonds, a guide to the Roberts family records at UNB, the Desmond Pacey Fonds, the David Adams Richards Fonds, the Sir Charles G.D. Roberts Fonds, the Collected Poems of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts Fonds, the Collected Letters of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts Fonds, the Dorothy Roberts and August R. Leisner fonds, the Roberts family photograph collection, the Lady Joan Roberts Collection, the Lloyd Roberts Collection, the Theodore Goodridge Roberts Fonds, the Stuart Trueman Fonds, the Fiddlehead/Cogswell Papers, and the David H. Walker Fonds. All of the collections receive very detailed descriptions and in some cases even contain genealogical charts. Selected archives contain a link to a form which the user can fill out to request photocopies of some manuscripts. A price list for this and other services is also available online. UNB's are the most user friendly Canadian literature archives on the internet.

 

Dalhousie University

Dalhousie's Library Archives currently has a web page up dedicated to the Thomas H. Raddall Archives. The Archives main page implies that the Raddall page is not a permanent page, but a part of the university's "Virtual Archives" which "contains detailed information on some of our more significant collections". The Raddall Archives are described in detail. The first page contains links to biographical information about Raddall, a description of the scope and content of the Raddall Collection, a bibliography of all of Raddall's published works, and a photogallery of images relating to Thomas Raddall. The Raddall site, like the UNB archives, should serve as a model for other university libraries.

 

National Library of Canada

Although it is not a university library, the National Library of Canada is an important source for academics. Their Canadian Literature Research Service page provides links to important resources developed and put on the web by the National Library as well as links to other important Canadian Literature sites on the web:

The Canadian Literature Research Service (CLRS) offers researchers specialized reference, research, advisory and bibliographic services and prepares material for exhibitions on Canadian literature and literary publishing and reading lists featuring selected Canadian authors and themes in Canadian literature. In addition, CLRS develops electronic products designed to provide access to Canadian literature via the Internet.

Importants sections of the page are author bio-bibliographies of Carol Shields [the link to this one did not work when I tried it], Antonie Maillet, Robert Fulford, Roch Carrier, Douglas Coupland, Charles de Lint, Timothy Findley, Rohinton Mistry, John Ralston Saul, Dian Schoemperlen, and M.G. Vassanji; the list of references on finding out about Native Canadian Women Writers published in English; Women in Canadian Literature; the Earle Birney site at the University College of the Cariboo (discussed in detail elsewhere); the B.C. government's Emily Carr site (also discussed elsewhere); the Stephen Leacock: Humorist and Educator page; a Gabrielle Roy page and a page dedicated to Yves Thereiault. The link to this last page did not work when I tried to use it.

There are also links to three online exhibitions based upon the CLRS Collections: New Wave Canada: The Coach House Press and the Small Press Movement in English Canada in the 1960s, Celebrating the 90th Anniversary of McClelland and Stewart, and The Art of Illustration: A Celebration of Contemporary Canadian Children's Book Illustrators and to the National Library's "Hot Links" page of Canadian literature sites which is well worth visiting.

Finally, there is the Canadian Poetry Archive. The NLC describes the site as follows:

The Canadian Poetry Archive features selected poems from over 100 early English- and French-language Canadian poets. Digitized from public domain anthologies found in the National Library of Canada's rich literature collection, the poems represent some of Canada's most notable poetry from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Canadian Poetry Archive database is searchable by poet, title, keywords and date. Author, title and date indexes can also be browsed. Biographies of some of the more prominent poets in the database have also been provided. Each biography includes photographs, biographical text, a selective bibliography, a link to the poet's poems in the Archive, and a link to search the poet's name in the National Library of Canada's online catalogue, resAnet. The Archive was developed in the course of a metadata testbed project (Dublin Core and RDF), conducted in 1999 by the National Library of Canada's Information Analysis and Standards Division in cooperation with the Canadian Literature Research Service.

It offers a search capability which allows the visitor to search the archive by author, title, or keyword. You can then follow the links which the search generates to see specific books or poems online. There are also links to brief biographies of Pauline Johnson, Archibald Lampman, Susanna Moodie, Emile Nelligan, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Duncan Campbell Scott. It would be good to see this feature expanded to include all of the authors represented in the archive. Finally, this is a rather limited selection of links to other Canadian poetry related sites.