MICHAEL WORKED WITH SMALL COMMUNITY ARCHIVES

On July 21, I became the new Archives Advisor for the Archives Society of Alberta. Because I am new to the archival community here in Alberta, I (and your esteemed editor) thought a short biography was in order.

I was born in and have lived for most of my life in Kelowna, a city in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. While attending the community college there, I received my first archives experience, a summer job working for a Master of Archival Studies (M.A.S.) graduate on a survey of local archival holdings. Keeping this experience in mind, I transferred to the University of Victoria and received my B.A. in History. One of the components of my degree program was cooperative education, which involved leaving the university for a semester or two to participate in the workforce.

Fortunately, I was able to work at the Provincial Archives of British Columbia (as it was called then) and the National Archives of Canada. With my B.A. in hand, I enrolled in the M.A.S. program at the University of British Columbia in 1990. I graduated in 1994 after producing the thesis "The Records of Lawyers: Archival Appraisal and Access".

Since 1992, I have worked as a contract archivist at a variety of archives in British Columbia, mostly small community archives. Projects took me to such diverse places as Victoria, Kitimat, Oliver, Vancouver, Alert Bay, and Powell River. Along the way, I developed a "sub-specialty" in medical archives through contracts at the B.C. Medical Association Archives, the Victoria Medical Society and Shaughnessy Hospital. Most of the contracts involved appraisal, arrangement and description of archival material, with some records management work thrown in for good measure.

In the coming months, I hope to meet, visit or talk with many members of Alberta's archival community. I look forward to your calls and questions.

I can be contacted by phone at 403-433-8496, by fax at 403-988-6849, or by email at mgourlie@connect.ab.ca.