In the BC Archives

Spend a very contented day yesterday here, in the Reference Room of the British Columbia Archives in Victoria.  Online registration waiting for me, two trucks of document boxes at hand, friendly staff, and terrific documents, mostly handwrittens and carbon copies, that hardly anyone has looked at in fifty years. Wish I could have stayed a month.

Reading B.C. Bookworld on the ferry, amazed as ever at the sheer volume of books the province produces, I found both an article by and a review of a new book by the always productive British Columbia historian Patricia Roy -- the book actually being a history of the BC Museum and Archives. This led me to her recollections of her early years at the University of Victoria in the mid-1960s. Read 'em and weep, academic job-seekers:

Those of us from the relatively small cohort born during or just before the war were expected to report to classrooms and complete our dissertations while teaching full-time. Academic jobs were rarely advertised. In some cases, department heads seeking new faculty contacted their equivalents in departments that offered graduate degrees; in others, graduate students wrote to those departments where they thought they might like to teach with an outline of their qualifications and their interest in a position if one were available.

This is just a quick and busy trip west, so I trust my left-coast friends will forgive being neglected.  Blogging should get more active next week.