Cycling for Libraries - Canada!
So Cycling for Libraries is over for another year! This was my fourth Cycling for Libraries tour. It was the first of the main annual tours to happen outside Europe as 31 library cyclists from around a dozen countries donned their hi-vis jackets and embarked upon a 385km trail during a heatwave in Ontario!
For once, instead of battling often windy and rainy conditions, the Cycling for Libraries gang was bathed in 30+ degree sunshine as we made our way from Welland (near Niagara Falls) to Toronto.
Sweltering library cyclists taking a dip in Lake Ontario to cool down!
The theme was multiculturalism and we saw some amazing examples en route. These included a library for the indigenous communities of Canada; families of Canada's aboriginal population who had lived in Ontario long before the colonialists took over.
While riding the historic Brock's Route, we saw an example of a First Nations settlement, complete with this amazing timber longhouse!
The plight of the First Nations population was later highlighted by The Tragically Hip (something of a national institution in Canada, as the "most Canadian band in the world") at their last ever gig.
The Six Nations Public Library celebrated its 50th birthday whilst we were out there and we felt really humbled by the welcome they gave us. After a particularly fatiguing stretch of the ride, we were grateful to be able to pop in for some strawberry juice (...awesome strawberry juice, by the way!) + cake and cookies! It was a chance to find out about their rich cultural heritage too, with six Iroquois tribes all living in the same territory near Brantford, Ontario. The Six Nations Public Library work helps to both preserve the unique history of these cultures and to unite them as a cohesive community.
Cycling for Libraries was there! Photo credit: Six Nations Council
In Toronto itself, staff put on presentations all about the efforts the Toronto Public Library service goes to in welcoming the multicultural communities it serves. These include services for Syrian refugees who are actively welcomed into Canada (cf. the UK Government!). Being able to access schemes like Dial-a-Story and Library Settlement Partnerships can be an invaluable source of support and information for those arriving in the country for the first time. Thanks must go to Jamie Johnson - a participant in 2015's Cycling for Libraries tour - for arranging this seminar for us.
Sulekha Sathi presenting on Multiculturalism at Toronto Reference Library (see: http://www.olasuperconference.ca/SC2016/event/serving-multicultural-communities-in-21st-century/)
We saw some fantastic collections en route too, including the brilliant William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University. Highlights included an early edit of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, complete with a pencil sketch of said titular clockwork orange by Burgess himself(!)...and the Bertrand Russell collection featuring correspondence between Russell and Muhammad Ali! In Toronto, we saw the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection which features this rather quaint Sherlock Holmes-themed reading room + bear!:
The Arthur Conan Doyle Collection at Toronto Reference Library
Also in Toronto is the famous Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library (pictured below) where some of us had the chance to see an exhibition on Art & Literacy during China’s Cultural Revolution and examine some of the jewels in the crown from their collection, including this star book!:
We had the chance to tour the Ontario Legislative Assembly Library (pictured below left) too, housed in a magnificent sandstone palace (nicknamed locally as 'The Pink Palace'!) which has stood as the regional government's parliament since 1893. The mesmerising interior, complete with mosaic ceiling can be seen here (below right):
I covered Cycling for Libraries' social media presence for the duration of this year (specifically the @cyc4lib Twitter account and the Cycling for Libraries Facebook page). I found we got a lot of support and enthusiasm from the libraries we visited which was great to see!
Find more tweets from this year's tour
by searching the hashtag #cyc4libcan
Other participants and myself were also interviewed for the Niagara Falls Review whilst at Niagara-on-the-Lake Library. We talked about how important organisations like Cycling for Libraries are in highlighting the continued relevance of libraries to different communities. The full article can be found here.
The fabulous reading garden outside Niagara-on-the-Lake Library - produce from this garden is sold locally.
There were a few surprises along the way, as there often are on Cycling for Libraries tours...(!) We missed out on a visit to one library as an intruder alarm had been activated and staff were waiting for a security team to arrive to switch this off - apparently this is something of a Cycling for Libraries first!! We were at least able to peek in through the windows...!:
Cycling for Libraries having a nosey whilst locked out!...
Meanwhile, Mississauga had closed its libraries owing to a strike, so (reluctant to cross any picket lines, of course...) we were unable to visit libraries there too. By all accounts, the strike ended in a successful resolution for the library staff involved. I was unclear as to what to make of this. On the one hand it seemed libraries and librarians were being undervalued by their local authority, as seem so often elsewhere...but on the other, the success of the strike at least suggests staff organisation/unionisation to confront this problem is stronger than I had encountered before. I came away with the impression public libraries in Canada were in much better shape than many of the countries I had toured previously (and certainly the UK - which sort of goes without saying, nowadays, sad as this is!).
As well as some 19 libraries along the route, we were able to visit 2 wineries, a cheese maker and a brewery!
In many ways this was the most comfortable and best organised of all the tours I've attended. Sure we had a day where 7 cyclists ended up with flat tyres...whilst contending with the heat made for some long, tiring days...but the Canada tour felt a very different animal from the crowded hostels of Holland or the battering we got from the elements during the New Nordic tour (as I've blogged about in previous years!).
We don't yet know where the tour will be hosted next year (although Finland is emerging as a strong candidate...especially with the Finnish/Suomi 100 years of independence coming up!). Almost everyone I spoke to said they hoped to take part in the next tour and once again it was great to catch up with some familiar faces this time around!
As ever, thank you to the organising team, our support crew and staff at all the libraries we visited along the way.
Cycling for Libraries 2016 arriving at Toronto Reference Library!
Photo credit: TPL