Cdn. artifacts may be at risk

DEVASTING FIRE AT BRAZIL MUSEUM SERVES AS WARNING

As Brazil mourns the loss of irreplaceable artifacts after a fire ravaged the collection at its national museum, Canadian archivists say some of this country’s heritage treasures could also be at risk.

Cara Krmpotich, director of the University of Toronto’s museum studies program, said dangers like earthquakes, flooding and forest fires have made emergency preparedness a priority for Canada’s archival spaces, but funding for infrastructure can be hard to come by.

“Could what happened in Brazil happen here? In some ways, absolutely,” said Krmpotich.

“If we think about shifting weather and climate change, absolutely this is something we should be thinking about in Canada.”

On Sunday night, flames tore through Brazil’s National Museum, and officials have said much of Latin America’s largest collection of historic and scientific artifacts might be lost.

In the aftermath, Brazilians have pointed to chronic underfunding of the building, including the lack of sprinklers, as a likely source of what many people are calling a preventable tragedy.

The collection at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto houses national treasures like the oldest English printed book in Canada from 1481, the letters of General James Wolfe, and written archival records of artists like Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen.

Associate chief librarian Loryl MacDonald said the institution is fairly well supported by donors, and while risk of damage always exists when dealing with precious artifacts, the university is better prepared than most to respond to disasters.

“I believe a lot of the issues in Brazil revolved around not getting the financial resources they need, so knock on parchment paper that we wouldn’t have the same incidents here,” MacDonald said.

A 48-page disaster preparedness plan is in place to minimize damage to the library’s valuable collection in case of a fire or water damage from sprinklers, including a trained salvage team to inspect and review the books.

But fires and other disasters aren’t unheard of at Canadian institutions, including the University of Toronto.

In 1890, a fire destroyed almost 33,000 books in the university’s collection, including a rare copy of Audobon’s Birds of America that would now be worth more than $10 million.

Earlier this summer, a server crash wiped out the digital archive at Memorial University of Newfoundland. While all hard copies of the documents remain, and all public services have been restored as of Sept. 1, the process to restore the public Digital Archive Initiative is ongoing.

In 2014 a fire broke out at the Musee de la civilisation in Quebec City, posing a threat to the collection.