Fisheries closing library network
The libraries are home to the 50 illustrated volumes from Britain’s Challenger expedition that sailed the seas in the late-1800s exploring the mysteries of the deep.
The shelves heave with reports detailing the DDT pollution that wiped out young salmon in New Brunswick’s “rivers of death” in the 1950s. And they contain vivid reminders of native fisheries, Canada’s once-vast cod stocks and the U.S. submarines that prowled the quiet fiords along the B.C. coast in the 1940s — history being packed into
“It is information destruction unworthy of a democracy.”
PETER WELLS
boxes as the Department of Fisheries and Oceans “consolidates” its worldclass library collection.
Seven DFO libraries across Canada are to close by the fall, including two that have been amassing books and technical reports on the aquatic realm for more than a century.
The department said “all” the materials will remain available either online or through interlibrary loans.
But critics said digital and remote access are no replacement for the real thing. They also fear valuable information will be lost in the purge now underway as the libraries are dismantled.
“It is information destruction unworthy of a democracy,” said Peter Wells, an ocean pollution expert at Dalhousie University in Halifax, who describes the closings as a “national tragedy.”
Eric Mills, a specialist in the history of marine sciences at Dalhousie, sees it as a “disaster” that will stifle research. Jennifer Hubbard, a science historian at Ryerson University in Toronto, said it could make fisheries’ science “a lot less effective.”
They also noted one of the libraries being closed — a climate-controlled facility at the St. Andrews Biological Station in New Brunswick built at a cost of several million federal tax dollars — opened just last year.
“They’ve invested all this money in a beautiful new library and now they want to close it down,” Hubbard said.
One thing DFO and the critics do agree on is that the libraries contain one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of information on fisheries, aquatic sciences and nautical sciences.
The libraries house thousands of reference books, and decades of technical and station reports on everything from beluga whales in the Arctic to oil spills on the east and west coasts.
DFO officials were not available for interviews on the library situation, but the department’s media office said by email the closures make sense in the increasingly digital world.
“The growing willingness of Canadians to look online, coupled with an increasing presence of information online, including electronic scientific journals, enable the department to consolidate its library resources,” said Melanie Carkner, a DFO media relations adviser.
She said consolidation of the seven libraries is to be completed by the fall. Collections now located from Vancouver to St. John’s, Newfoundland, are moving to what DFO is calling its “primary” libraries — one in Sidney on Vancouver Island, the other at an institute in Dartmouth, N. S. Two “subsidiary locations” in the Ottawa region and Sydney, N.S., will support the Canadian Coast Guard.