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History of the Pride Library

Welcome to the Pride Library. What do we have to be proud about? Well, for starters, we take pride in the establishment of our library in 1997 as an official UWO research site, the first of its kind at a Canadian university. The UWO Research Facility for Gay and Lesbian Studies is the umbrella under which the Hudler Archives and the Pride Library first began. As the rainbow design of our logo indicates, the Pride Library is a space where sexual diversity is celebrated and advocated in the spirit of the annual Lesbian and Gay Pride marches across Canada and throughout the world.

We're also proud of the many Friends of the Pride Library who have contributed time, ideas, money, advice, and of course, books to keep the project going. As a result of their enthusiastic support, our collection of publications by and about lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transsexuals, and transgender people has grown from 100 to over 10,000 volumes in just 14 years.

The cultural achievements of queer folk throughout the centuries -- in literature, art, music, film, philosophy, theology, law, journalism, medicine, science, and the social sciences -- are another source of pride at our site. The emergence of gay and lesbian movements since the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 has resulted in an unprecedented growth in scholarship and publication on issues relating to all aspects of sexuality. Academic resistance to discrimination and censorship has opened up a new field of studies concerned with the history, politics, and culture of sexual minorities. We're proud to declare that The Pride Library is a site of such resistance, which serves to promote and advance interdisciplinary scholarship in this field.

Though The Pride Library is administratively independent of the UWO Library System and receives no regular financial support from the University, our ever-expanding collection is recognized as a specialized information site under the generous terms of a cataloguing agreement with the University Library Administration. The cataloguing project has been made possible by grants from the President's Committee on the Safety of Women on Campus. Our presence on the WebPAC is marked by our very own location codes: every time you find a title marked with a PRI (PRISTK for stacks, PRISPE for special collections, PRIREF for reference, PRIAVC for audio-visual collections, PRIPER for periodicals) you can be sure that it's located at the Pride Library.