New Titles Tuesday. Welcoming the CanIL collection

Alloway Library is pleased to welcome the Canada Institute of Linguistics library collection of books, journals, and media items into the library’s general collections.  Since July of last year staff at both libraries have been working together to transfer the material with minimal disruption to library users and ensure that it is a good move for both CanIL and Trinity.  By January, the first CanIL book was added to Alloway Library’s catalogue and placed on the shelf. Over the spring and summer the entire collection of over 7600 items will be reviewed and made ready for transfer onto Alloway Library’s shelves.

Language/linguistics has been the major focus of the CanIL Library with strong sub-foci in Bible translation, missions, literacy/education, sociolinguistics, bi- and multi-lingualism, language and culture acquisition, language teaching, language survey, linguistic analysis, discourse analysis, semantics and lexicography. As well, there are resources of interest to TESOL students, education students and communications majors. A substantial section of the collection is dedicated to language-specific materials.

For researchers in linguistics and other fields, the benefits of integrating the collections are many: CanIL’s linguistic resources will be shelved along with existing resources in Alloway Library so scholars, by accessing a single online catalogue, will find a wide array of resources including print books, eBooks and journals to support their research. As the CanIL material is added on an almost-daily basis to Alloway Library’s catalogue the resources will be much more discoverable and accessible for holds and renewals.

Some titles of interest from the CanIL collection include:

• Bible translation resources, including Hebrew and Greek source materials
• Books on sign language
• Ethnologue: languages of the world – Digital edition
• Many of the Blackwell, Cambridge and Oxford Linguistic Handbook series
• Many of the Routledge Language Family series
• Many of the Yearbook of Morphology series
• Missions resources and missionary biographies
• Most recent edition of The Expositor’s Bible Commentary
• Most recent edition of The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible
• SIL-related audio-visual materials
• The Blackwell Companion to Phonology ( 5 volumes)
• The Journal of the Linguistic Society of America)
• The Journal of West African Languages

(These items may not be transferred to Alloway Library at the time of publication, but may be found in the CanIL catalogue.)

As part of the integration process, librarians created a flowchart to facilitate the work of identifying duplicate copies and newer editions, and selecting copies in the best condition for continued use. Library staff also needed to create capacity on our existing shelves to add over 190 full shelves of material. Prior to the start of the project, Alloway Library’s language and linguistics books sat on 119 shelves; when integration is finished,  there will be over 210 shelves for material with that classification.

CanIL has been offering quality linguistic and literacy training in Canada since 1985.The CanIL library at TWU grew out of a travelling library that began in the 1940s. That library found a home on the TWU campus when the Harvest Centre was built in 2003. Alloway Library is proud to continue to support linguistic scholars with this collection.