Archivists race to save Toronto history from acidic doom

Two collections of Toronto’s historic record are slowly being eaten away by a chemical reaction on the same material they were originally placed to preserve them, but archivists are painstakingly and patiently working to save the material from a vinegary fate.

Both the Canadian National Exhibition and the Toronto Reference Library have large collections capturing Toronto history on cellulose acetate. In the CNE’s case, it’s more than 102,000 photo negatives captured by the former Alexandra Studio photography company, for the TRL. It’s a massive catalogue of microform and microfiche newspaper transfers. Both collections are at risk of being lost to time because of a process called “vinegar syndrome.”

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“The majority of our negatives are cellulose acetate,” said Shayda Spakowski, the CNE’s Event Coordinator of Arts Heritage, “which means as they start to break down in high temperature and humidity, the surface area starts to shrink and channel and off-gas very similar to vinegar.”

“When you open a drawer and get a whiff of vinegar, you know your collection has been contaminated,” Spakowski said.

From a room in the CNE’s General Services and Archives Building, Spakowki has been meticulously cataloguing tens of thousands of negatives shot at the exhibition from the 1950s to the early 1980s. Photos detailing antique auto parades, drag boat races, and many other events she knows people with a fond memory of the Ex will want to remember for years to come.

Already hundreds of negatives have begun to curl and crack to the point of no return. Spakowski carefully takes each negative in her white gloves, lays them on a scanner, and saves digital copies before storing the negatives in a freezer to prevent further degradation. She admits it can take a lot of patience, but it’s a task she feels she has a great responsibility to carry out.

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“I wanted to make sure the memories that are captured here,” she said “are preserved so future generations of people can come in and say, ‘This is where my great-great-grandfather sold his merchandise at the CNE.'”

The responsibility to preserve history is also felt by those working to save the microform collection at the Toronto Reference Library. All of the acetate records have been moved into a room on the lower level, where a delicate sorting process is underway. Thousands of newspaper records, which include long-defunct Toronto papers dating back to the late 1800s, are a mixture of acetate microform and polyester. Acetate lasts about 70 years, while polyester lasts several hundreds of years.

“We want to do as much as we can to preserve our local history collection, so our plan right now is to transfer the acetate onto polyester so that it will have a longer lifespan and then hopefully in the future look into possibly digitization,” said Nancy Duncan, a Library Service Manager.

Inevitably, there are simply too many records to preserve, so the Toronto collection is taking priority. Other collections, which include copies of newspapers from other cities, won’t be rescued because they’ve already been digitally preserved at other libraries in other cities.