Professor Margaret Banks

Margaret Amelia Banks (1928-) was born in Quebec City and pursued a distinguished career spanning history, archives, and law librarianship. After completing her Honours History degree at Bishop’s University (1946-1949) and M.A. at University of Toronto (1950) under Frank Underhill, she earned her Ph.D. in 1953 on Edward Blake’s Irish career, later published by University of Toronto Press in 1957. She worked as an archivist at the Public Archives of Ontario from 1954-1961 before transitioning to law librarianship.

Banks joined the University of Western Ontario Law School in 1961 as law librarian, where she built the collection from 8,000 volumes in the Engineering Building under Dean Carrothers. She was instrumental in founding the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL), serving as treasurer from 1964-1966 and helping establish it as an independent organization after initially being a chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries. Her influential book ‘Using a Law Library’ reached its fourth edition and became a standard text for legal research education. Banks also wrote the faculty history and expressed interests in Parliamentary procedure consulting and early retirement to pursue major writing projects.

This description was written by AI and may contain some inaccuracies.