To Archive Ephemera: The Importance of Atom Egoyan’s Collection at the TIFF Archives

The advantage of a multi-faceted institution like the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is its capacity for connecting different aspects of the film industry to one another. For example, TIFF’s archive houses a large quantity of ephemeral material that correlates to its databases; this binds collections together through metadata. The Atom Egoyan collection is particularly robust; all that stems from the wealth of information can be extracted from the paper ephemera that were donated in 1999. I use this opportunity to detail the general indispensability of ephemera when it comes to treating films as legacy objects and not just forms of entertainment, and by carefully examining and cataloguing the Egoyan collection, in particular. I created a digital catalogue that ties together item level titles, descriptions, dates, physical locations, and other forms of identification; this in turn builds upon the previous finding aid by strengthening the information taken from it.