Toronto's Reference Library will get $3 million from Ottawa toward its $34 million modernization and renovation, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Friday in Toronto.

The two-stage overhaul, starting soon and ending in March, 2011, will create a new two-storey rotunda, a "spectacular entrance" and updated computer stations, Harper said.

Ajon Moriyama, the son of celebrated architect Raymond Moriyama who designed the building, will oversee the renovation to make sure it adheres to the original vision, Harper said. Ajon Moriyama is a partner in his father's firm.

The $3 million is Ottawa's share of a $34 million library renovation project for which the city will contribute $14 million and the province $10 million. The Toronto Public Library Foundation will raise the rest. The money, said Toronto Mayor David Miller, is in addition to the federal stimulus money for Toronto announced last month.

The library, on Yonge St. north of Bloor St., houses "one of the country's most important reference collections," Harper said, but it and the world had both changed greatly since he used the facility as a student in Toronto in 1977.

The project will create local construction jobs "when they are most needed," he said, and is part of Canada's economic stimulus plan.

"The challenges of the global recession are great but greater has been our resolve as a country," Harper said in thanking Miller and the library foundation for helping make the project a reality.

The project will "keep us in the forefront of library science," Miller said at the news conference just before noon in toronto. "An economy recovery may be on its way but we cannot and will not take it for granted."

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