After extensive searching through our old CCLA Bulletin newsletter, we learned that the first CCLA website went live in Spring 1998. Through the magic of the Wayback Machine, we grabbed an image of the earliest archived version of the website:

 

Now, if you can believe it, the CCLA’s website looked like that until 2010. For those of you who will get a kick out of this sort of detail, the site was built using Netscape.

For an association as old as we are, there are shockingly few pictures from CCLA history. We can’t find any pictures from inside the old courthouse, our conferences and events weren’t well documented in photos (not anymore, of course!), and we don’t have pictures of many of our past presidents (or librarians!).*

We did dig out of storage, however, pictures from when the library at the Elgin Street courthouse was new. Old technology! Temporary signage! The Scotiabank calendar that is *still* in our copy room 28 years later!

     

1988 (left) and 2016 (right)
Click each picture to enlarge

Here are two pictures of our Canadian Law Reports section – as it was in 1988, and how it is today. It’s hard to believe those shelves ever had so much empty room. When someone does this retrospective in another 28 years, it’s safe to say there will be no law reports at all. With legal research moving online, this section doesn’t get a lot of use anymore, and like the law reports from many other libraries who’ve remodeled recently, this part of the collection will have to go when we renovate our space.

*All that to say, please send us your old CCLA pictures!

 

Everyone’s favourite downtown eyesore, Somerset House, was in the news again this week. For as long as I’ve lived in Ottawa, the building has been in a state of disrepair, and it got me wondering what this building looked like in its heyday. I managed to dig up this old picture courtesy of OttawaStart.com.

Somerset House circa 1900 (Image via Heritage Ottawa)

Somerset House was originally built in 1899, and over the years was a dry goods store, a hotel, and a pub. Unrelated to the building, but worth noting, is in the picture above, the person to the right in the foreground appears to be riding a donkey.

You can see a sliver of the building in this later photo of the corner of Bank and Somerset. The building in the centre of this photo was the Bank of Montreal, and is currently part of the Your Independent Grocer (known more commonly, of course, as Hartman’s) – you can still see this outer facade on the Somerset side of the building.

(Bank of Montreal exterior, 1954. Image MG393-NP-30364-001, copyright held by the City of Ottawa Archives)

With the NCC having announced its new fifty year draft plan for Canada’s Capital city, I got curious and went on a wild goose chase to track down anything and everything I could find relating to the city’s developmental history (such it is with librarians).

One of the more interesting things I came across was this bird’s eye view image of Ottawa circa 1895, with drawings of the more prominent buildings around the edge (click to enlarge).

Image Credit : Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

There’s also another great view of the city from a little earlier, around 1876, found here, courtesy of Library and Archives Canada.

Happy Canada Day!

It seemed only fitting that today’s #TBT go back to the beginning of the holiday. In June 1868, Canada’s first Governor General Lord Charles Monck made a proclamation to celebrate the anniversary of confederation on July 1. Other things on Lord Monck’s resumé: law degree from Ireland, marriage to his first cousin, and this rad beard:

In 1879 the proclamation was formalized through legislation: An Act to make the first day of July a Public Holiday, by the name of Dominion Day. (click the image below to enlarge)

Source: Dominion Day, Government of Canada

 

Credit: William James Topley/Library and Archives Canada/PA-

To quote the Joni Mitchell song, “They paved paradise / And put up a parking lot.” I don’t know that anyone would describe the Supreme Court as paradise, but what was once the beautiful old Supreme Court building is currently a parliamentary parking lot.

I stumbled across this interior picture on the Library and Archives Canada online image database, and immediately wanted to take a trip back through time to see this building. In use by the court from 1882 to 1945, the building was originally built as the Board of Works (nowadays Public Works and Government Services) Workshops Building, and it was actually shared with the National Gallery. Alas, the building was demolished in 1956, and the lot it was on has remained relatively empty since then (click here to see that spot in Google street view). To learn more about this building, and see some more vintage Ottawa pictures, check out this great post.

We found this neat throwback in storage – an 1895 invoice from Carswell (now Thomson Reuters) for a subscription to Canadian Law Times. $5.00! We still have those journals in our library – here are a couple of pages, including the front page from June 1895. That’s an interesting looking article there on page 148!

 

From the CCLA Bulletin, June 30, 1996.

Can you believe that 1996 was 20 years ago? Ah, 1996. The Summer Olympics were in Atlanta (who remembers these hats?), everyone was dancing the Macarena, and one whole day at the CALL Conference was dedicated to The Internet! I think we can safely say that the Internet has, in fact, dominated the scene.