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Thousands of Canada’s oldest photos and movies have a new $17-million home in Shirleys Bay where they won’t degrade and, just as important, won’t burn down any buildings.

Old negatives sometimes catch fire. Movie film can too. And they become less stable with age, as the nitrate-based film used until the 1950s degrades.

With some 60,000 archived nitrate-film photos and more than 4,000 reels of film on its hands, Library and Archives Canada decided it was time to move them from an unsafe building at the former Canadian Forces Base Rockcliffe to a new and safer home.

The images paint Canada’s history and early culture from the 1880s.

Many come from National Defence, showing Canadians in two world wars.

There’s also a photo collection called the Merrilees Transportation Collection, with historic ocean liners, aircraft, automobiles, bicycles and trains.

There are early works by Yousuf Karsh, and the earliest films of the National Film Board.

And in 2003 the auditor general said it was high time to move these cultural treasures from the substandard Rockcliffe storage building.

Nitrate film doesn’t need a match to go up in flames, says Mario Gasperetti, manager of installations at Library and Archives.

“It can self-combust. The lowest temperature that they’ve recorded (that triggered such a fire) was something like 38 degrees Celsius. There have been cases of films being stored in metal sheds and the sheds reaching that temperature and film catching fire.”

And once it starts burning, it doesn’t stop. Nitrate film contains oxygen, which it releases as it burns. This just fans the fire.

Most fire extinguishing methods try to take away the oxygen supply, whether with water, foam or gases. But this won’t work with films that carry their own oxygen supply.

(Nitrate film fires play a role in the movies Inglourious Basterds and Cinema Paradiso.)

The new facility will divide them among 20 storage rooms, each at two degrees, and each with a very low humidity. Each storage room has 16 sprinklers to cool the film if there’s a fire, and prevent the heat from spreading to other rooms.

There are also three rooms where staff can make digital copies of the old images, at a slightly more comfortable 10 C, but the originals will not be thrown away.

“This facility ensures that the whole collection is stored for future generations,” Gasperetti said. “It also gives us rooms in which we could digitize the collection,” which wasn’t available before.

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