Torontonians listening to Anne Murray’s music for more than 40 years can now hear rare versions of her songs while scouring a one-of-a-kind collection of Canada’s Songbird’s contracts, letters, albums and photos.

Murray, the 72-year-old country and pop legend, last week gave a massive collection of records from her career to the University of Toronto Library. It includes every one of her albums released in every territory in the world, rare test recordings, 881 photographs, scrapbooks from the 1970s, all her concert contracts from 1970 to 2006, and more.

“What happened was that I was moving from a house into a condo and when we closed my offices, I had all this archival material that we had saved, kept,” she told the Star on Friday.

Murray, who described herself as a “purger” said she thought about throwing away much of the stored items. But when she was put in contact with U of T archivist Brock Silversides, her mind was changed.

“Brock presented a great case for what would happen to all of this and that it would be available to everybody,” she said. “Now that it’s done I’m happy about it.”

“(Murray) is unbelievably important for the music industry,” said Silversides, director of the Media Commons, where the archive is now housed. “It sounds corny, but her music has been the soundtrack to many peoples’ lives.”

It’s Silverside’s job to curate and preserve audio and video-centred archives at the university — a job he’s been doing since 1980.

The Media Commons includes donated archives from dozens of notable Canadian artists, including the rock band Blue Rodeo and film director Atom Egoyan.

Anyone from the public can come look at the collections, which have corresponding inventories to help them find what they’re looking for. All they have to do is contact Silversides to set up an appointment.

“I think the idea is slowly getting out there,” that their resource is in the city, Silversides said. “We could provide a lot of pleasure.”

Timothy Benson, a longtime Torontonian who runs a Facebook group for Anne Murray fans, is one of the people looking forward to seeing parts of the archive.

“Her groundbreaking successes were, and are, proof that we too, as Canadians, can make our mark,” Benson said.

He’s seen some of her awards already at the Anne Murray Centre in Springhill, N.S., so what Benson’s most looking forward to seeing within the archives are the “behind the scenes” artifacts like letters and test presses.

As for Murray, her favourite pieces from the collection are the ticket stubs from her many concerts over the years — a walk down memory lane.

Of all the archive collections Silversides looks after, Murray’s stands out for its size and scope.

“A collection like Anne’s: the value is that it’s so comprehensive,” Silversides said. “That’s what gives it scholarly research value.”

He referred to Murray’s exhaustive concert, radio, and television contract records, which could help popular music historians piece together a picture of how the industry worked over the course of 36 years with precision.

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For anyone studying Murray’s career in particular, the collection is a treasure trove.

“The next biography, boy, is that going to be detailed,” Silversides said.

It took assistant media archivist Christina Stewart about six months to inventory and organize everything within Murray’s collection.

Silversides admitted that over the course of his career, he’s had moments of being star struck.

“In the end you realize that they’re normal people and the ‘star struck’ part of it fades away. You’re colleagues,” he said.

He hopes that as the library collects more collections like Murray’s, more people will start to see the value of researching popular music, which he sees as a rich field.

“Not everyone takes popular music archives seriously,” Silversides said. “For me, popular music is a very serious topic.”