This week in advance of National AccessAbility Week 2026, we are taking a dive into Open Collections to trace the history of the Crane Memorial Library, UBC’s library for the blind and partially sighted – and the remarkable people who made it happen.
This post is part of a short blog series inspired by National AccessAbility Week 2026, which seeks to raise awareness around the importance of accessibility in Canada, and National Deafblind Awareness month which seeks to draw attention to deafblindness this June.
Content Warning: This blog post features items that may contain outdated, ableist, and derogatory language about blind, deaf and disabled people.
Before the Library – Charlie Crane
The story of the Crane Library at UBC started way back in the 1930s with one man, Charles “Charlie” Allan Crane (1906-1965) who attended UBC between 1931 and 1933.
Charlie Crane was the first deafblind person in Canada to attend university when there were few accommodations for disabled students. His time at UBC was brief, but when he died in 1965, he donated the largest known private collection of Braille texts in the world (numbering around 6,000 volumes), to the University of British Columbia.
Crane Memorial Library
In 1967, after receiving the contents of Charles’s private collection UBC announced plans for the new Charles A. Crane Memorial Library in Brock Hall. Open Collections has multiple photos of the Opening Ceremony and commemorative plaque installed in 1968.
The library officially opened on April 4, 1968 on the first floor of Brock Hall after receiving funding from the CNIB and the UBC Woodward Foundation. A generous donation of $4,700 from the Delta Gamma sorority was used to create a small reading room.
Paul and Judy
Two key figures that pop up a lot in the Crane Library are Paul and Judy Thiele. Paul was a partially sighted MA student who became the head of the Crane Memorial Library in 1968, and went on to teach at UBC for 35 years before retiring in 2001. In 2021, Paul was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by UBC for his pioneering work at the Crane Library before he passed away in 2023.
Judith Thiele was the first blind person to graduate with a library degree in Canada. During her career, she was one of the few professional librarians in Canada who was an expert in Braille and alternative formats. She worked for the library for over 20 years, serving as the Reference Librarian for the collection until her death in 1993.
Both Judy and Paul’s legacies have since been carried on by the Judith C. Thiele Memorial Scholarship and the Paul E. Thiele Bursary which are granted annually to disabled students attending UBC.
The 1970s and 1980s – Growth and “Talking Books”
The UBC Archives Photo Collection and UBC Publications collection include multiple interesting snapshots of the Crane Library during its peak operations in the 70s and 80s.
Classified ads from the Crane Library often appeared in the pages of The Ubyssey recruiting students for their volunteer reader program, which paired blind students with sighted volunteers who could read regular library books and course materials to them if a Braille version or audio recording wasn’t available.
While UBC publications such as Biblos and the UBC Library Newsletter provide other interesting details of its unique collection.
“Talking Books”
In the early 1970s, the Crane Library received multiple grants to begin a “talking book” recording program. They initially aimed to record 400-500 talking books a year, but production rapidly expanded throughout the 1970s and 80s becoming one of the library’s core services.
While the materials in the library were primarily intended to serve UBC’s blind students, they were also available to students with learning or other print disabilities.
Photos from the 1980s show the library’s extensive bookshelves, recording studio, and recording booths. Audio recording continued at the library into the 2010s and over time the library transitioned from tape reels to cassettes to CDs and eventually, digital audio.
Crane Disability Resource Centre (1995-Present)
In 1995, the Crane Library was renamed to the Crane Resource Centre, and made a division of what was then called the Disability Resource Centre (DRC), now known as the UBC Centre for Accessibility.
Even after this, small glimpses of Crane Library continue to pop up in Open Collections throughout the 90s and 2000s, showing how the library’s services changed after the digital millennium.
Conclusion
The Crane Library is a testament to the impact and importance of accessibility at UBC and beyond. However, as we are reminded every National Accessibility Week, the work of accessibility is never truly done and we all have a role in maintaining accessibility for generations to come.
We hope you enjoyed this blog post! There is plenty more to be found on Open Collections about the Crane Library and we hope this post illuminated this underrecognized piece of UBC history for you!
For those interested in finding more, the following Open Collections Searches are useful when researching the Crane Library:
Related Blog Posts
Recommended Reading
- Anderson, R. (2013, June) “The Useful Citizen,” Trek Magazine (Open Collections), 28–32. Also available online here.
- Carbin, C. F., & Smith, D. L. (1996). “Down Memory Lane”—Insights, Anecdotes, and Adventures. In Deaf heritage in Canada: A distinctive, diverse, and enduring culture. McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Available free online via the Canadian Cultural Society for the Deaf.
- Rubery, M. (2016). The untold story of the talking book. Harvard University Press. Available via UBC Library.
