Last day at work, British Columbia Archives, Royal BC Museum

My last day at work at the British Columbia Archives, Royal BC Museum, was Friday, December 18, 2009. My working life at the BC Archives, known as the Provincial Archives of British Columbia when I started, will have covered 29 years less a day from when I started in 1981. Here is some of what I wrote in a farewell thank you to my co-workers:

... I've seen too many changes to even begin to recount them all. Of all the activities with which I was associated over those three decades, I'm most proud of having introduced automation to the BC Archives in the form of dedicated word processing equipment, of having championed the introduction of Internet e-mail and of starting the process of converting our hardcopy finding aids to electronic versions.

In case you've been wondering what I was up to the rest of the time, I was hired as an archivist to work in the Sound and Moving Division and then moved from there in 1986 to the Library and Maps Division. In 1992 I made my final move to the Reference Services unit. I worked half-time for six months in the now-dissolved Corporate Information and Management Library, 4000 Seymour Place, managed the implementation of the Voyager library system for the BC Archives Library as part of a Y2K software transition project, served as the Private Records Archivist between 2002-2008 and helped with the implementation of MAMMOTH [an acronym for the Royal BC Museum's new collections management system] over the past two years.

I've been extremely fortunate in my career here to have had the support of managers, supervisors and very dedicated co-workers, all of whom ensured that each day here was something to look forward to as I knew each one would be different and that I would learn something new.

Equally as important to me as significant and long-lasting memories are of experiencing someone else's joy at finding a tiny or a large part of their history in our records and objects.