Brief history of the bibliography project

During the 1970s and 1980s, both the Federal Government of Canada and the Provincial Government of Alberta encouraged Canada's ethnocultural groups to maintain, document and develop their cultural heritage, and provided funding for this purpose. Like many other groups, the German-Canadian Association of Alberta decided to establish an inventory of German-Canadiana in Alberta's libraries, archives and private collections. This inventory was to make it possible for members of the several  German-speaking groups and others, for scholars as well as teachers, to access information about the heritage of speakers of German in the province in a single, central database.

Please note: In this bibliography, the terms "German cultural group", "speakers of German" and "settlers of German origin" include "Germans" from Germany in its various political incarnations as well as from the U.S. and Central and Eastern Europe; the terms also include the Austro-Hungarians, the Austrians, the Swiss, the Mennonites and the Hutterites, and many others. The term "German" or "the Germans" should therefore always be taken to refer to this broader meaning.

A small committee consisting of representatives of the German-Canadian Association of Alberta and several staff members from the University of Alberta developed an action plan. After a grant was received from the Multicultural Commission, a researcher was hired to collect bibliographical references on the "German cultural groups in Alberta" and to organize them by keywords in a standard card catalogue. A great deal of work was accomplished by the researcher in documenting more than 1,000 entries. However, as government policy changed, grant money became no longer available, and after about six months the search had to be terminated. Several months later, a volunteer from the Association entered more than half the entries collected into a professional-quality database to facilitate information retrieval. Subsequently, the project lay dormant for several years.

In 1998, the compiler of this Bibliography undertook to complete the project on his own on behalf of, and with the consent of, the German-Canadian Association of Alberta. Two years later, the Bibliography was posted on the Internet. In the same year, the Annotated Bibliography of the Cultural History of the German-Speaking Community in Alberta: 1882-2000, a book with 710 pages, was published.

Since then, seven biennial updates with items of interest to the German communities in Alberta (extracted from the German-language newspaper Albertaner as well as the Edmonton Journal, the Calgary Herald and other sources) have been compiled and posted on the Internet (they are available for free from here); hard copies have also been sent out as donations to all universities in Alberta and to leading Canadian, American and German university libraries as well as to provincial archives. Copies have also been deposited with the Library and Archives of Canada and the U.S. Library of Congress.

The compiler has also published the following books since 2000 on the history of the German-speaking groups in Canada, and specifically in Alberta:

• with Gerhard Bassler, German language maintenance across Canada: A handbook (Edmonton, 2004), 457 pp.
• A history of Alberta’s German-speaking cmmunities. Volume I: From the 1880s to the Present (430 pp.). Volume 2: Profiles of members of Alberta’s German-speaking communities: 1953 to the present (190 pp.) (Okotoks, AB: 2007).
• A history of the teaching of German in Alberta (316 pp.). (Okotoks, AB: 2009).
• The settlement of immigrants of German origin in southern Alberta between the 1880s and 1910s: A fact book (308 pp.; includes a DVD with census data from the 1891 to 1911 censuses) (Okotoks, AB, 2011).
• The settlement of immigrants of German origin in northern Alberta between the 1880s and 1910s: A fact book (230 pp.; includes a DVD with census data from the 1891 to 1911 censuses and excerpts from a German-language newspaper published in Edmonton between 1905 and 1915) (Okotoks, AB, 2013).

The objective of the project has been to disseminate this information as widely as possible to both the professional and the lay person interested in the cultural history of the "Germans" in Alberta. It is hoped that the concise annotation accompanying each entry will provide enough information to whet the reader's curiosity and to guide him or her in researching topics of interest.

This website received literally thousands of visits until 2011 when the Faculty of Arts server at the University of Alberta, where this bibliography had been and is again being hosted, crashed and the software written to enable visitors to search the database was lost; its back-up copy was also corrupted. For almost two years the online search facilities were therefore unavailable, but in the fall of 2011 the Team Lead of the Arts Resource Centre - Kamal Ranaweera - was kind and generous enough to offer to write new software on his own time, and therefore the search function is available again (thank you so much, Kamal!).

This bibliography adds substantially to the important and comprehensive investigations carried out by Professor Alexander Malycky (University of Calgary), Professor Hartmut Froeschle (University of Toronto), and others. Their pioneering and exhaustive bibliographical work is gratefully acknowledged as are the contributions of many others.

It is in the nature of a bibliography that it is likely to be incomplete and, in places, incorrect. The compiler welcomes suggestions for additions and changes. Please write to Manfred Prokop at the University of Alberta.

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