Citizen Participation in Library Decision-Making: The Toronto Experience

Dean Tudor is a journalism professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute and founding editor of the CBRA.

Marshall, who has taught a highly useful community library course at the Faculty of Library and Information Science of the University of Toronto, here presents an anthology of some 15 papers (plus his own overviews and summaries) in what he calls a “mixed bag” of emotional opinion, hard facts, scholarly papers, news accounts, “insider” reports, overviews — all authored by former students, politicians, librarians, community workers; and so forth. Essentially, it is the history of a decade of changes, beginning in 1973. Reform groups had sprung up between 1969 and 1972 to combat expressways and developers. In 1972 a reform-minded council was elected in the City of Toronto, but by then the expressways and the developers had been given the boot. Reformers were able to move on to other areas, such as the Board of Education and the Library Board, with reform candidates and politicians sitting on these boards. The major concerns of the new Toronto Library Board then became a need for the selection of more Canadian materials, a need for majority use of the libraries, greater involvement with the community as part of equalization of resources and strengthening of the branches, and a need for better reading material for children. In those days of stresses and strains, the obvious battles broke out between the Board, senior management, and the regular staff. This book provides the history and the documentation of all of this, and more. There is lots of meat here, but some comparative figures are missing. For instance, how many more people use the library system today than in 1972? And in what ways? The black-and-white illustrations show the renovations to the branches, while the bibliography annotates the many Toronto Public Library reports. Highly useful and readable.