The Toronto Star has donated more than one million photographs, spanning the years 1900 to 1999, to the Toronto Public Library. This collection represents the Star‘s entire photo archive.
Toronto Star publisher John Cruickshank said: “These remarkable photos will now be easily available to students, researchers and all the people of Toronto. We believe this collection will help all Torontonians better understand our past and appreciate our future.”
By July 7, the majority of the images will be publicly available in the Marilyn & Charles Baillie Special Collections Centre at the Toronto Reference Library. Some of them will also be available on the library’s digital archive in the near future.
According to John Honderich, chair of Torstar Corp. and a former publisher of the Toronto Star, the collection includes “some of the most iconic photographs of the city” and captures “both the times of triumphs and the times of despair over a century in the life of Toronto.”
Toronto’s outgoing chief librarian Jane Pyper said: “This photo archive is believed to be the only complete archive of Canadian news photographs spanning the entire 20th century.”
The donation is one of the ways the Star is working with other institutions in the city to “create a lasting legacy for the people of Toronto.”
The Toronto Star Archives are available online on a subscription basis.
The article about the photo collection donation is available here.
