Starphoenix photo trove added to city archives
The Saskatoon Starphoenix has added more than 25,000 photos to the City of Saskatoon Archives in a huge collection transfer at the start of Archives Week.
The newspaper’s historic image collection, including clippings negatives going back to 1948, has been transferred to the city’s archives near the airport.
City archivist Jeff O’brien said he hasn’t yet had the chance to go through all 189 boxes of files the Starphoenix sent over on Monday, but noted that he’s excited to have this sample of public history in the archive.
“News outlets, media, are fantastically important when it comes to documenting the day-to-day lives of people and the events that provide context to those lives,” he said.
It’s a substantial amount of history to be added to the city’s stores, but these are not the first pieces of history from the newspaper that have a special place in the archive. O’brien said one of his favourite pieces is prominently on display: a mock front page from the era of the Second World War that was used as an ad to sell war bonds.
O’brien said the number of documents the archive receives is never consistent. Files will often arrive in bursts as people or companies stumble upon boxes of files that have been stored away for years.
“It varies from year to year,” O’brien said.
“I don’t have stats in my head ... but the size of the collection here has certainly more than doubled what it was when I started with the city in 1997.”
Archives Week in Saskatchewan is an annual event that helps celebrate the province’s history and all the people who help preserve it. The week lasts until Sunday, but the capstone was a variety night on Thursday hosted by O’brien and featuring historical records and recreations.
The photos from The Starphoenix have been added to the main storage room of the archive building, which is temperature-controlled around 17 C or 18 C to help preserve the files.
O’brien said the photos will be a permanent part of the archive’s collection.
“You want to think of time as a river that never stops,” he said. “In the archives, we have all these frozen moments of time. And what happens is the river of time is no longer moving. I can go back and step on the same piece of water if I want.”