Working in British Columbia this week (beautiful late summer weather in October), I got to spend a day in what must be the most beautiful archives in Canada, the B.C. Archives in Victoria. It's part of the BC Museum complex, tucked in between the Legislature and the Empress Hotel right by the Inner Harbour. If researchers need distraction they can watch the ducks on the pond outside the reading room. Only the reading room at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, with its spectacular view of the Ottawa River, can match that.
I was following a complicated trail of just what records had been kept and what discarded from one particular B.C. public institution, so the archivists presented me with a fat binder that holds the procedures for managing that record set. I'm always amused at the way people talk of "dusty archives" and imagine them full of old documents handwritten on vellum. Most archives are record management centres, and once again I was struck by the complexity and sophistication of the intellectual control processes archivists use every day. One thing few people realize about records management: much of what the archivists do is deciding what records to delete. Nope, it ain't a matter of filing everything.
Thanks BC archives folk -- I appreciated all the help.
