On a drizzly Wednesday morning I made my way from the Lyon OCTranspo LRT station to the Library and Archives Canada building on Wellington Street in Ottawa. I signed in — my user card had expired — and, after depositing my jacket in a locker (not allowed upstairs, no matter how fierce the air-conditioning), took the lift to the second floor. Then I learned that user cards no longer expire.
- I wanted to order a series of London (England) city directories that I’d consulted many years back. It took the second-floor help desk a while to find the right catalogue entry. The desk staff placed the order for me specifying the years I needed. There was a hiccup, the helpful reference technician got back to me so the items had to be reordered on Friday. As of Tuesday the order is “Not ready for pick up”.
- I next went to the south side of the second floor, to the Alfred Pellan Room, to see how the Creative Space initiative mentioned last week was faring. There were activities laid out for kids and families, but no clients when I looked in. A helpful staff member told me as many as ten people had dropped by at once. Not pictured is a table with two typewriters that, apparently, youngsters can’t resist. The whole thing is a trial run for a proposed feature at the new Ādisōke facility.
- On the third floor, in the genealogy consultation area, there were three clients. I was told the plan is to move all of that area’s holdings to its counterpart at Ādisōke, a shared space with the Ottawa Public Library.
- What won’t be making the move is the full city directory collection, along with many of the open-shelf microfilms. These will have to be ordered in. Anyone trying to follow a person through a run of successive directories can expect delays in retrieving several volumes at a time from off-site storage, to say nothing of the wear on materials in transit. Perhaps, in time, they’ll be digitized, copyright permitting.
- My last stop was the north side of the third floor, the document and microfilm consultation areas, where I counted fifteen clients in all. Everyone I dealt with was helpful, if constrained by uncertainties about the client experience at Ādisōke.
- Nothing about us without us.
Serious academic, professional, and individual researchers remain concerned research efficiency will suffer with the move to Ādisōke when resources are no longer available self-serve. Has that community been consulted, and listened to? Could LAC be open about the cons as well as the pros of the move, and how they will address the cons?