[Web4lib] David "Camera Workers" Mattison's retirement from the British Columbia Archives, Royal BC Museum

[D.H. Mattison]

December 17, 2009

Dear colleagues and friends (physical and virtual),

My apologies for any duplicate copies of this message you might receive as
I'm sending it to multiple mailing lists. Part of this e-mail is also based
on my farewell message to my workplace which some of you will also have
seen.

December 18 is my last day of work at the British Columbia Archives, Royal
BC Museum. I started work in what was known as the Provincial Archives of
British Columbia on February 2, 1981 and over those three decades as an
archivist and a librarian I've seen too many changes to even begin to
recount them all. Of all the activities with which I was associated over
that time, 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 for online access.
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 also managed the
implementation of the Voyager library system in association with the
University of Victoria Library for the BC Archives Library as part of a Y2K
software transition project, worked half-time for six months (2001-2002) in
the now-dissolved BC Government's Corporate Information and Management
Library, 4000 Seymour Place, served as the Private Records Archivist between
2002-2008 and during my last two years helped with the implementation of the
Royal BC Museum's new collections management system.

I've been extremely fortunate in my career to have had the support of
managers, supervisors and very dedicated co-workers, all of whom ensured
that each working day 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 the archival records preserved by the BC Archives, Royal BC
Museum.

I have also learned much over the years from you my colleagues about
archives, records management, digital preservation, historical research and
outreach. 

I'll look forward to continuing our conversations in person or in
cyberspace.

With much aloha,

David "Camera Workers" Mattison

Victoria, BC, Canada

cameraworkers at gmail.com

http://davidmattison.wordpress.com

http://cameraworkers.davidmattison.com

http://www.davidmattison.ca

http://ca.linkedin.com/in/davidmattison