Carnegie Library to Get $12.6M Makeover to Bring Winnipeg Archives Home

Archives held in warehouse since 2013 flooding disaster.

Councillors on the property committee voted Thursday to approve funding for the restoration of the Carnegie Library, which was heavily damaged by flooding in 2013.

Since then, sensitive documents spanning the city’s 150-year history have been stored in a warehouse on Myrtle Street, which historians and archivists worried did not have the appropriate equipment to preserve them.

“Nobody expected that the archives was going to spend a decade in … what is  [basically] a warehouse in the industrial district,” said Shelley Sweeney, archivist emeritus at the University of Manitoba.

“It was, sort of, just temporarily put there, and it’s in an extremely difficult location to find. It’s not particularly accessible.”

A 2016 report noted the building on Myrtle didn’t have appropriate space for conservation and preservation treatment to enable appraisal and description of fragile paper records dating as far back as 1874. 

You can read more in an article by Cameron MacLean published in the CBC.CA web site at: https://tinyurl.com/4uu3dr77.