The Library and Its Place in Cultural Memory: The Grande Bibliotheque du Quebec in the Construction of Social and Cultural Identity

摘要

The province of Qubec, the sole province in Canada where the citizens are a French-language majority, is also the only province with its own national library. The Bibliothque nationale du Qubec and other significant libraries around the world collect and preserve memory in ways that create a context for cultural recall. The first part of this article traces the heated debates that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries over the creation of a public or municipal library in Montral. The second part traces the events leading to the development of the Bibliothque nationale du Qubec and its subsequent merger in 2005 with the Bibliothque municipale de Montral to form the Grande Bibliothque, or "the new national library of Qubec.