“An Extensive Collection of Useful and Entertaining Books”: The Quebec Library and the Transatlantic Enlightenment in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At the height of the American Revolution in 1779, the Quebec Library was created by Governor Sir Frederick Haldimand. For Haldimand, the library had a well-defined purpose: to educate the public, diffuse useful knowledge, and bring together the French and English peoples of the colony. Over the years, the memory of this institution has faded and the library has tended to be framed as an historical curiosity, seemingly divorced from the era in which it was created. This paper revisits the founding and first decades of this overlooked institution. It argues that its founder, trustees, and supporters were not immune to the spirit of Enlightenment that was exhibited elsewhere in the British Atlantic World. When seen as part of the larger social and intellectual currents of the eighteenth century, the institution becomes less of an historical enigma and new light is shed on the intellectual culture of eighteenth-century Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".