Library and Archives Canada

Abstract

My vision for the next ten years at Library and Archives Canada—LAC for short—only makes sense if one keeps in mind the tremendous democratization of knowledge we have seen in the wake of digitization. At one time, only graduate students, faculty, and researchers visited national libraries. That was certainly my personal experience at the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Salle Labrouste, when I used to go there 45 years ago. Access to the 320 seats in Salle Labrouste was reserved for faculty and graduate students, and you had to get there early in the morning, at the rue de Richelieu, to line up so you could get one of those coveted seats once the doors opened. These days, thanks to the web, anyone and everyone—not only from our own countries, but from anywhere in the world—has total and unimpeded access to our documents. This has awakened an appetite for knowledge that we frankly find difficult to satisfy. In the French-speaking world, a turning point in the conception of the role of national libraries happened on July 14, 1988, when President François Mitterrand announced his intention to create an entirely new kind of library, one that would be open to everyone and that would be equipped with all types of supports. Since then, the longstanding distinction between a national library and a public library has blurred, and the unprecedented traffic we are seeing today at places such as the British Library (BL) and the Bibliothèque nationale de France are but two examples of that manifestation. Over the past years, LAC has plunged head first into this movement by bringing itself physically closer to public libraries. In November 2017, we moved our Vancouver offices that used to be located in a technology park in a remote suburb, to the premises of the Vancouver Central Library, which, as its name suggests, is located right in the heart of that Pacific Coast city. This shift has borne fruit, not only in terms of attendance, but