Université Laval traces its roots in the establishment of the Québec Seminary by François de Montmorency-Laval in 1663, and consequently the oldest in Canada. After the conquest of New France in 1760, the British expanded education in Canada beyond theology. Nevertheless, access to higher education was beyond the reach of French Canadians until 1852 when the Québec Seminary was granted royal charter by Queen Victoria to found Université Laval.

The new university operated from the same location as the Seminary in Old Québec, as well as shared its library. The latter quickly grew from 15,000 volumes at the foundation of the university to over 100,000 in 1887, making it the largest university library in Canada at the time. Today, with 6 million documents, it remains the largest French-language library on the continent.


In the 1950s, having outgrown its original location, the university began relocating to a modern campus west of town, in Sainte-Foy. The library however remained with the Seminary, hard to reach and underutilized. In 1962, a report revealed that library services were not worthy of the expanding university and desperately needed a dedicated structure and venue.
This wish was granted in stages, with individual faculty libraries gradually moving in to the new Sainte-Foy campus. A dedicated university library department was finally established in 1964, and soon after plans to organize the library were drawn with the help of former Harvard librarian and consultant Keyes Metcalf. Under the new plan, services would be provided by a “general library”, covering the humanities and social sciences while the library that had been established the year prior in the sciences building (Pavillon Alexandre-Vachon) would serve the natural sciences and medicine. After some years in a temporary space in the Humanities building, the general library finally received its own home in 1968.




Designed by architects St-Gelais, Tremblay, Tremblay and Labbé, the general library was initially separated between an undergraduate studying space in the lower level and a research library in the upper floors, where shelves were only accessible to professors and staff until 1974. In 1978, the building was renamed Pavillon Jean-Charles Bonenfant after a law professor and former librarian of the Québec National Assembly library.

Despite its heavy and immutable appearance, this library was conceived with flexibility in mind, following Metcalf’s recommendations. The four upper floors are free of structural walls, the space only defined by a regular grid of pillars and eight crenellated concrete wells for the staircases, elevators, washrooms and technical conduits. This modular design made subsequent transformations easier, such as the redesign of the 4th floor by Anne Carrier in collaboration with the original architects (later Bélanger Beauchemin Morency, now Groupe A) in 2011. Thus, the floors originally dedicated to closed stacks storage were opened and reallocated to new uses, as Metcalf had envisioned.
Anticipating future growth and increasing space needs, the new library was also deliberately built with space to spare. Part of the upper floors were filled with offices for administrative services when it opened, with the intention of turning the space over to the library as needed. With the advent of digital collections, the expected pace of growth has evidently diminished and in 2022, the library still doesn’t fully occupies the building.

In 2017, Anne Carrier also added a glass awning and entrance lobby as part of a redesign of the front plaza for the university’s 350th anniversary.

The images in this post were taken in February 2022.
Excerpts from this post appeared in the December 2022 edition of Information Professional.