Our onsite exhibits have several accessibility features, including a raised line orientation map, tactile graphics with braille text, and large font for interpretive text. For information about the accessibility of our public facility, please consult the accessibility section of our website.
For those unable to visit the Archives of Ontario in person, you can also explore amazing stories and records from Ontario’s past in our online exhibits.

Exhibits in the Helen McClung Exhibit Area showcase the work, collections, and services of the Archives of Ontario, and tell innovative and unique stories found within our holdings.

Onsite exhibits also include smaller case exhibits found in the Archives’ lobby, client lounge and reading room. These displays showcase and promote diverse publications, artwork and records from the Archives’ library, art and archival collections.

Entrance to the Archives of Ontario’s onsite exhibits is free during our regular business hours, Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Humans aren’t the only ones documented in our collections! Other species have also left their mark on Ontario’s history.

ANIMALIA: Animals in the Archives explores how humans’ relationships with other animals, and the methods we’ve used to document these relationships, have changed over time.

In this exhibit, you’ll learn about five distinct animal groups in Ontario—fish, bears, horses, dogs and birds—and discover how animals connect us to the land, provide food for many, help us get around, and enrich our lives. The diverse ways humans have recorded, remembered, and affected other animals often says as much about us as it does about them.

If you can’t visit the Archives in person, or if you’re just wild for more animal records from our collections, check out these additional resources:

• ANIMALIA: Animals in the Archives online exhibit

• “ANIMALIA: Animals in the Archives” Flickr album

• Animal-themed films on YouTube

• Traces of the Animal Past: Methodological Challenges in Animal History, a book about animal history that contains a chapter about the ANIMALIA exhibit by curator Jay Young

You can also discover more #ArchivesANIMALIA content and share your own animal stories by joining the Archives on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (@ArchivesOntario).

Previous Exhibits

• Family Ties: Ontario Turns 150

• Dear Sadie – Love, Lives, and Remembrance from Ontario’s First World War

• Perceptions of 1812: Identity, Diversity, Memory

• Gifted: Donations from the Ontario Society of Artists

• Arresting Images - Mug Shots from the OPP Museum

• Moriyama & Teshima - Architectural Dialogues

• Ontario - On the Map

The Helen McClung Exhibit Area is named for the first woman in Ontario who, upon her appointment as acting Archivist of Ontario, achieved deputy minister status. She served from 1939 to 1950.

McClung enjoyed connecting students to historical documents, and in 1947, she initiated an innovative travelling exhibit that toured schools in the province.