The Record’s visual history kept alive in digital archive
Waterloo Digital Library home to millions of newspaper’s photographic negatives
Nick Richbell walks among the stacks of rare books, manuscripts and papers at the University of Waterloo library and stops at a long row of metal cabinets containing the Waterloo Region Record’s collection of about three million photographic negatives.
“We love this collection, it is amazing, and when we do a tour this is pretty much always the highlight,” says Richbell, the head of special collections and archives for the university.
“For us, I think it is so important that we have this collection because of the stories that these photos tell,” says Richbell. “There is something for everyone in there.”
He oversees the huge job of making the images available on the Waterloo Digital Library. It is an enormous undertaking.
“It is probably the largest collection we have, undoubtedly, and most well used,” says Richbell. “I would say not a day goes by without us dipping into The Record’s negative collection.”
Inside the bank of grey cabinets are 170,000 envelopes holding an estimated three million negatives. On each envelope are the date the photo was taken, and a very brief description of the negatives inside. The cabinets nearly cover an entire wall in the climate-controlled room in the basement of the Dana Porter Library.
“You have to see the cabinets to really believe it,” says Richbell.
In 1987 the Waterloo Region Record donated the photographic negative collection to the university archives. It is arrived in batches, and now spans 1938 to 2001. After that The Record’s photo department went digital.
The oldest negative is for a photo of Sarah Churchill, the actress and daughter of Winston Churchill. She visited the area in 1938, not long before her father became Britain’s leader during the Second World War.
The grey cabinets hold around three million windows into this region’s past forming an irreplaceable visual history that covers everything from architecture and elections to hockey games and bumper crops.
There is a photo of a horse eating an ice cream cone held by a milkwagon driver in Kitchener named A.G. Wellheuser. That was Sept. 3, 1953.
A Record photographer covered a march in 1960 when scores of protesters moved down King Street and demonstrated on the steps of City Hall. They called for an end to Apartheid in South Africa. One young man has a jacket with “Waterloo College” on the back. There are older men in fedoras, and women with beehive hair and horn-rimmed glasses.
And just before Christmas 1953, The Record published a story and photo about a butchering bee at the St. Agatha Orphanage. Butchers worked together to make sure the children had enough meat for the winter. There is a photo of one butcher, Simon Dietner, wearing an apron and sharpening a big knife.
The collection of negatives required special care right from the start. The original envelopes had to be replaced with ones made from acid-free paper.
“We then had to put new labels on these packages, enter everything into a database so we could find it, and I think we got up to 1995. So we have six more of years of that data entry to do,” says Richbell.
That is an internal database the archivists use to search the collection, respond to requests and organize the collection.
Some of the 35-millimetre negatives from the 1970s had to be refrigerated to counter what is called “vinegar syndrome.” That’s when the negative degrades, and smells like the sour garnish.
“We bought a huge industrial fridge, wrapped the boxes up and put them in,” says Richbell.
Many of the older negatives contained nitrates, which can easily catch fire. These were scanned with the help of a grant from the Heritage Foundation.
Digital files are uploaded to the Internet to servers known as the
cloud, and preserved using a special program.
“And it (the cloud) runs checks on them over time to make sure there is no bit rot or deterioration in the cloud,” says Richbell. “And they will be stored in three different locations, so there are three copies made to ensure they are safe.”
At this point, the university archive has posted 1,445 photos from the collection on the Waterloo Digital Library. The majority of the photos are from two periods — 1952 to 1954 and 1960 to 1968. A smaller number date back to 1940 or up to 1978.
What can be viewed on the Waterloo Digital Library now is a tiny fraction of the collection.
So far, about 70,000 negatives have been scanned, and uploaded to an internal database. There are about 100,000 more to go.
The bigger negatives from the 1930s through to the 1970s scan fairly quickly, taking about a minute. It is a different story for 35 mm negatives. There might be as many as 24 negatives on the scanner bed requiring 45 minutes to process.
After scanning, each file is given a meaningful name so it can be quickly located on a shared drive used by library workers, says Danielle Robichaud, digital archivist with the university’s special collections and archives.
After scanning, the hard work begins. Robichaud studies microfiche rolls of old newspapers to see if a photo was published and, if so, on what date. She wants to know why the photo was taken and the names of the people in it.
The photo of the butcher sharpening a knife is a good example. It was in an envelope called “St. Agatha Orphanage.” That made no sense to the digital archivist until she found the information in the microfiche about the butchering bee at the orphanage. That photo was published six days after it was taken.
Robichaud can spend hours collecting what she calls the metadata for each photo from the microfiche. Sometimes all of the information she needs is in the cutline below the image but sometimes it’s not, and she has to read the article that goes with it.
In many cases, photographs are published many days after a photo shoot. So Robichaud hunts through the microfiche until she finds it.
“That’s the two main pieces, the scanning and getting the additional information,” says Robichaud.
The third part of the work is copyright. Photos taken before 1962 are in the public domain. After 1962 permission to use them is needed from the photographer or the newspaper.
“Just having them scanned isn’t the end of the story,” says Robichaud. “Even though I am working in a digital environment and we do try to automate things, the vast majority of the work that goes into getting this stuff into the digital library is just a lot of oldfashioned research.”