The Research Centre will be a fully-staffed professional research centre, housing the Black Star and other collections in a museum-quality climate-controlled environment. Students, academics, curators, and others are welcome to access the Research Centre and the collections within, by appointment.

The Mira Godard Study Centre 
from the early 1970s to the present

The Mira Godard Study Centre was established as a resource centre forty years ago to meet the School of Image Arts’ specific instructional and research needs. It developed in response to a radical shift in curricular direction in the late 1960s that emphasized contemporary scholarly and creative activities over technology. Housed in the Image Arts building, the Study Centre was from its inception physically separate and administratively independent from the main university library. It acted as an adjunct facility offering specialized and comprehensive collections of artist files, periodicals, rare books, a slide library of 160,000 slides and a curated photographs collection of some 2,700 original nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century prints by well-known photographers of international status. Unique in Canada, the holdings of the Centre have historically provided a rich source of study material for undergraduate and graduate students in their study, creative production and scholarly pursuits, and substantially supported faculty in their delivery of courses.