One of my favourite rooms in Canada is the reading room that fills the rear of the third floor of the Library and Archives Building in Ottawa. (The library reading room right below it is beautiful too, but one has one's loyalties). It's vast, quiet, plain, high-ceilinging, and its enormous windows give a wonderfully soothing vista over the Ottawa River. Having spent days and weeks there has always seemed to me like the essential credential for historical practice in Canada.
Used to be, when I was spending those days and weeks, you could sign out the documents and series during working hours, and then you could work all night and all day in the reading room if you chose. The archives never closed. The work of history never stopped.
I never did pull an all-nighter in the archives, but I always liked the idea that you could, that you could work in the sources forever if you had the stamina and the pre-planning.
Long gone, alas. The LAC is announcing even more strict limitations on service and use of the consulting rooms at http://www.collectionscanada.ca/whats-new/013-298-e.html. The Canadian Historical Association is organizing protests.
