|
National Library News |
Anne Pichora,
Research and Information Services
The April SAVOIR FAIRE seminar was presented by Gilles Gallichan, librarian and historian at the Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée nationale du Québec, who described the library’s ongoing project to reconstruct the debates of the Assemblée législative (nationale) du Québec for the period 1867-1963.
Mr. Gallichan began the session by explaining that parliamentary debates began to be recorded officially in Canada in 1875, with the provinces very gradually following suit. Quebec started the official report of its debates in 1964. Mr. Gallichan’s project was initiated as a continuation and completion of the work begun by Marcel Hamelin, to reconstitute the debates of the first three Quebec legislatures, from 1867 to 1878. The reconstitution has progressed to cover the period from 1879 to the late 1920s. The volume for the 16th legislature, 4th session, 1927 is the most recently published (1998) of this series, entitled Débats de l’Assemblée législative.
Overall objectives of this project include meeting the requirements of parliamentary research, responding to the public’s right to information, providing a historical context for legal research, and ensuring that the debates are formally documented. While this documentary record is an essential source for research on the historical and political evolution of Quebec society, Mr. Gallichan noted that it is also critical to many specific facets of historical research in Quebec – notably regional histories, legislative and genealogical studies, as well as research on a broad range of other topics for this time period.
Mr. Gallichan, as a member of the research team, explained that this project is an attempt to restore the text of these debates from a variety of sources – newspapers, pamphlets, relevant official publications, and archival sources and is, in effect, an "archeology of the word". He described how the research team systematically examines and compares all the newspapers of the day in order to assemble the most complete and neutral version of the debates – despite the wide variety of reporting styles, coverage and political influences of the newspapers. Using overheads of extracts from newspapers’ parliamentary reports, Mr. Gallichan demonstrated how the often colourful language of the newspaper accounts is converted to the more official and standardized language of the debates and how the technical editing of this text evolves. As speeches made in parliament were also occasionally printed as political pamphlets, these documents, together with political memoirs and various archival sources, provide additional information to supplement the newspaper reports. When the editing and reconstitution of the text has been completed, it is formatted in two columns to resemble the text of the older reconstituted debates. It is thought that this style was originally selected in an attempt to reflect the importance of the texts and to denote respect for the content. As a final step, indexes for subjects, names and bills are compiled by the same team which prepares the indexes for the current debates.
Gilles Gallichan concluded his presentation by noting that the evolution and growth of all of these sources during the 20th century has provided a more in-depth and extensive research base. Mr. Gallichan stressed how valuable the broad range of material held in the National Library of Canada is to the research process. He added that the preservation of printed sources and their reproduction through digitization or microfilming projects, such as that done by the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions (CIHM), are of vital importance to this project. These reconstituted debates will continue to provide researchers in history, political science, law, economics and sociology with a richly recorded and complete documentation of the debates of the Assemblée législative du Québec.