The Toronto Archives acquires, preserves, and provides access to historical records that significantly enhance our understanding of Toronto’s development, its natural and built environment and its people. You can contribute to this by making a financial donation or by donating records and documents of historical importance.

Making a Financial Donation

Make a financial donation to the Toronto Archives through Donate TO. Your financial donation will support our efforts to make records such as correspondence, photographs, maps, and plans more accessible through conservation projects, digitization initiatives, exhibitions, and educational programming. Tax receipts will be issued for donations of $20 or more.

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Donating Archival Materials

Types of Donations

Original documents such as photographs, maps, architectural drawings, sound recordings and moving images (such as films and videos), pamphlets and reports, postcards and many other kinds of two-dimensional records are accepted. We also collect digital photographs, digital sound recordings, and digital moving images (films and videos).

We do not collect newspapers, magazines, books, three-dimensional objects, paintings or photocopies. We also try not to get duplicates of things that we already have.

Subject areas

Only records about Toronto are collected. We are particularly interested in materials that reflect the development of:

  • Toronto’s built environment (buildings, streets, bridges, reservoirs, etc.)
  • Toronto’s natural environment (parks, rivers and lakes, ravines, waterfront, etc.)
  • Toronto’s people and culture (family records, business records, neighbourhoods, arts organization records, etc.)

How to Donate Materials

Contact the Archives at archives@toronto.ca with a brief description of the records you wish to donate. If you are able to, include volume of records, form of documents (photographs, postcards, etc.) and subjects covered. Providing photographs of the documents also helps.

Accepting a Donation

You will have to sign a donation agreement transferring legal ownership of the material to the City of Toronto. You may also be eligible for a tax receipt. After a period of time, your donation will be described in our database and available for the public to access.