If you live in Toronto and miss your weekly Metroland community newspaper, the Toronto Public Library system is one place where you can look at its old issues.
Normally.
A cyberattack has left newspaper collections inaccessible for months and there is no firm date for reopening them.
In the coming year, the public library system is expected to regain use of its microfilm readers, opening collections for study of newspapers from Scarborough, North York, Etobicoke and other neighbourhoods where Metroland’s journalists chronicled local life until this fall or, in some cases, during years before the pandemic.
Staff at the Toronto Reference Library (TRL) downtown hope to reopen the Toronto Star Newspaper Room in its basement by the spring and shortly to start copying its microfilms of newspapers there — which are on acetate and thus vulnerable to decay from “vinegar syndrome” — onto polyester, which should last for centuries.
Eventually, the newspapers at TRL and others in the system may be converted into digital form if resources allow.
At the North York Central Library this month, history librarian Andrew Lowe confirmed the building’s new local history room has boxed microfilm of the North York Mirror from 1957 to 2015, as well as scrapbooks from the 1970s and 1980s, which may contain Mirror articles.
“Anything North York-related is here in our building,” Lowe said.
The library put together a working list in 2022 to keep track of Metroland publications it has.
That list says the TRL’s collection of the Etobicoke Guardian (which started as the Lakeshore Advertiser and celebrated 100 years of local journalism with a 56-page special issue in October 2017) starts in 1952 and ends in 2020.
The Richview branch in Etobicoke has a collection of the Guardian spanning from 1952 and March 2009.
The Scarborough Mirror can be found at the TRL too, from its first issue in 1962 to December 2020. Microfilms at the Cedarbrae branch in Scarborough are incomplete, but go from 1962 to 2016.
Printed copies of the Scarborough Mirror from 1972 to 2023 are stored in the Scarborough Archives.
People seeking the Scarborough Mirror have an advantage: the Scarborough Historical Society kept years of its local Metroland weekly together and the Scarborough Archives, a former general store, stores 78 boxes of the Mirror upstairs.
Archivist Rick Schofield estimates the boxes hold 25,000 printed pages from the 1970s up through the newspaper’s final issue on Sept. 14, 2023.
The building also has microform copies of earlier Scarborough Mirrors, though not a user-friendly reader, and bound volumes from 1985 through 1987.
TRL also has microfilm rolls of the North York Mirror from 1957 to 1976 (Don Mills edition) and from 1987 to December 2020 (Willowdale edition).
Metroland Media newspapers published before September 2023 — including the North York and Scarborough Mirrors and the Etobicoke Guardian — are stored in the Toronto Reference Library and in different branches across the city such as these microfiche at the North York Library.
Metroland formed through a 1981 merger of Metrospan Community Newspapers and the Inland Publishing Co.
Certain other Metroland weeklies in Toronto stopped publishing years before the company’s decision in September to stop printing community newspapers. In some cases, these weeklies can also be found in the library system.
Issues of the Bloor West Villager (later the Bloor West-Parkdale Villager) as far back as 1981 are at the Runnymede branch running, though incomplete, through 2013.
There are East York Mirrors at the Leaside branch from 2012 to 2018, by which time the paper had become the Beach-East York Neighbourhood Voice.
The York Guardian from 1998 to March 2018 is at the TRL, as are microfilms of the City Centre Mirror from June 2009 to August 2012; by 2018, those two weeklies had become the York-City Centre Neighbourhood Voice.
The Etobicoke Historical Society (EHS) did not collect Guardians, but its previous historian Denise Harris wrote a column for the paper from 2013 to 2018 titled “History Corner,” which were reproduced with permission and are available on the group’s website.
EHS president Neil Park said he was sad to see the end of the Guardian and other community papers. “There really is no substitute for a local newspaper in giving a voice to small community groups and local businesses in reaching a wide audience,” he wrote this month.
A bound volume of the Willowdale (North York) Mirror from 1985 is kept in the Scarborough Archives.
The Guardian, and North York and Scarborough Mirrors once published three times a week.
For its 10th anniversary in 1972, the Scarborough paper announced larger presses had let the Mirror expand its front section, add a second for sports and a third, Topics, “20 pages of features probing many aspects of suburban life.”
Readers or researchers who look through the boxes of microfilm — perhaps seeking out the work of local columnists or photographers such as Ian Kelso, Irv Mintz and Dan Pearce, all of whom covered the city for decades — will get a view of Toronto’s neighbourhoods and what occurred in them, often out of the major media spotlights.
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