"National Library"

[Hugh Brodie]

The CFC financial statements refer to the "National Library". What is its history? Does it exist in a publicly-accessible location? What are its contents?

[Wayne Komer]

Re: "National Library"

National Library

I wish someone would answer Hugh’s questions.

I have my laptop and a suitcase all packed and I am ready to go to this National Library to do research in old Canadian chess magazines.

But where to go and are the magazines there? Is there a good hotel nearby?

The CFC Handbook online has this:

335. National Chess Library: That the CFC establish a National Chess Library to be housed at the national headquarters in Ottawa. [see Motion 91-3, GL, December 1990,p.2-8]

Can anyone give more details?

[Stephen Wright]

Re: "National Library"

See various comments in this thread:

http://www.chesscanada.info/forum/sh...surer-s-Report

[Nigel Hanrahan]

Re: "National Library" and provincial contributions

I should mention as well that not long ago there was a donation of all the issues of the Manitoba provincial chess magazine, Exclam!, to the library of the Provincial Legislature (or was it the Manitoba Archives? I'm not sure.) . I think J. Ken MacDonald was involved. This sort of thing may also have happened in more than one province.

[Vlad Drkulec]

Re: "National Library" and provincial contributions

I don't believe we are in a position where the library can be visited. Michael von Keitz is in the process of digitizing it. I would have to sort through too many emails to figure out exactly where we are on this but I probably have hundreds of emails from Michael with digitized images attached. I downloaded some but not all of them. When things slow down I will probably systematically download them as a backup. We are in the midst of our AGM and also about to send a team to Mongolia for the U16 Olympiad as announced in the online meeting. On top of that we are getting near the point of finalizing our WYCC lineup. Lots going on and reading Chesstalk starts to drift down the list of priorities.

[Kerry Liles]

Re: "National Library" and provincial contributions

I don't believe we are in a position where the library can be visited. Michael von Keitz is in the process of digitizing it. I would have to sort through too many emails to figure out exactly where we are on this but I probably have hundreds of emails from Michael with digitized images attached. I downloaded some but not all of them. When things slow down I will probably systematically download them as a backup. We are in the midst of our AGM and also about to send a team to Mongolia for the U16 Olympiad as announced in the online meeting. On top of that we are getting near the point of finalizing our WYCC lineup. Lots going on and reading Chesstalk starts to drift down the list of priorities.

There are possibilities to host the 'archive' somewhere "in the cloud":

MvK might consider uploading the scanned images to (for example) a shared Google drive and grant read access to the world and then share that link here so that everyone could browse the images etc. Of course, that means a bit of work for MvK - the filenames might need to be more meaningful than any sort of default name like "scan0001.jpg" etc to make browsing more pleasant. And, it might be worthwhile to at least initially create sub folders named according to the source of the scans...

[Vlad Drkulec]

Re: "National Library" and provincial contributions

There are possibilities to host the 'archive' somewhere "in the cloud":

MvK might consider uploading the scanned images to (for example) a shared Google drive and grant read access to the world and then share that link here so that everyone could browse the images etc. Of course, that means a bit of work for MvK - the filenames might need to be more meaningful than any sort of default name like "scan0001.jpg" etc to make browsing more pleasant. And, it might be worthwhile to at least initially create sub folders named according to the source of the scans...

This is something we can look at in a few weeks once all the dust settles on the AGM, WYCC and U16 Olympiad.

[Hugh Brodie]

Re: "National Library"

I can see two digitized "libraries" being set up - one private for internal CFC documents (e.g. correspondence which might need to be left confidential), and a public one with publications (such as magazines and tournament bulletins). In any case - I hope that the originals never get destroyed.

[Vlad Drkulec]

Re: "National Library"

I don't think that we get much correspondence except via email and there are no plans to do anything with that though I probably load up outlook or some other email program and download everything since hotmail has a habit of occasionally disappearing emails.