The historic Lynch Annual Report Collection (LARC) consists of over 16,000 annual reports, plus a small mix of other public documentation like prospectus statements, filing and listing statements, shareholder reports, and information sheets. Representing (mostly) Canadian businesses from approximately 1935 to 2011, the majority of the reports are from the 1960s to 1990s. Metadata for each item is simple, consisting of the company name, the publication year and, when available, the location of the company headquarters and former company names.
This collection access points include the catalogue, A-Z database list, the library digital collections page and directly from the Internet Archive.
Even if you don’t think graphs and charts are interesting, check it out to see how corporate communications and graphic design have changed over the decades for such companies as Molson Breweries, Air Canada, and Harlequin Publishing. Have a reference question about greenwashing in communications? This might be the perfect primary resource for some serious deep dive research! For more information, you can read a blog post written by one of the digitization assistants who worked on the collection from 2024. This project began in 2019 thanks to Janet Williamson’s suggestion and many digitization assistants and ISS colleagues helped us prepare the material for digitization by matching up the metadata with the physical items.
This collection is complementary to McGill Library Canadian Corporate Report collection (which is also *eventually* migrating over to the Internet Archive ), a smaller collection from Columbia University and the subscription database Mergent Archives.