In a large top floor office at the Pacifica Papers paper mill in Powell River, BC, Juania Swanson and Emma Levez are working full time to arrange, describe, and preserve some 30,000 images kept by the mill since it commenced operations in 1912. 

The Millennium Project, as it is known, was conceived by Bill Murray and myself back in the spring of 1998, when Bill asked me to come to Powell River and assess the materials being stored there with a view to their future preservation and accessibility. I found the negatives and prints to be in remarkably good condition considering their long storage in an industrial zone with airborne pollutants a daily reality. Nitrates appeared to be non-existent and the acetates were well preserved with little or no signs of deterioration. I also discovered that an extensive system of indexing had already been established. This would greatly help with arrangement and description, but what was interesting was that the mill had not only employed photographers to document all aspects of mill and town development, but had also employed a librarian to provide systems of access to these and other materials. I knew that with computer technology, we could build greatly on this existing system, while preserving its original numbering and groupings.

Just over one year later, based on the report that was generated from that site visit, Bill convinced the mill's owners, Pacifica Papers Inc. to issue an Authorization for Special Expense (ASE) for $150,000 to preserve the photographic and other materials in proper archival enclosures and to then create a database which would help make this precious material accessible to the public. Also envisaged was a Web page that would make the material available to researchers all over the world.

In early October 1999 the Millennium Project officially got under way with the hiring of two employees by my company Archivia Enterprises for a fifteen month term. More than forty people were interviewed from a pool of one hundred applications, almost all of them local. Pacifica Papers set aside a very large office for the project. New carpeting was installed, Steelcase office furnishings and ergonomically designed chairs were installed, along with large work stations, conference table, and shelving. The bulk of the material was housed in five fire-resistant cabinets which were so heavy that professional movers had to be hired to bring them to the third floor office. Once my employees were established in their tasks, I returned to Sidney and monitored the daily progress from my home office via faxed journals, telephone and e-mail. I continue to make site visits every month or two as needed.

The first phase of the Millennium Project involved physical re-housing in acid-free enclosures as well as numbering of all prints, negatives, albums, and other materials. During this time, many long-forgotten or never seen images began to emerge and the interest of management and staff mounted. Unforgettable images of the first paper rolls bundled and ready for shipment in 1912 along with others arriving at distant cities such as Houston; Santiago, Chile; and Havana, Cuba or the first car in Powell River being drawn by a horse during the First World War, or great sailing ships at the wharf preparing to load newsprint, or construction of the Powell River and Lois River Dams. This is indeed a treasure trove of British Columbia history and it has been very exciting to be involved in bringing it to light.

The re-housing phase was largely completed in early February 2000. The second phase now under way involves taking existing information about the images outlined on cards, envelopes, and in index books and entering it into a database so that it can be stored and searched electronically. In addition, each image is scanned so that a thumbnail print accompanies each descriptive record and is expandable for enhanced viewing. Old indexing numbers have been retained alongside the new numbering to recreate original order when desired. The database is Boolean searchable and RAD compliant, but has additional fields for cross references, subject headings (with controlled vocabulary), geographic location, and others as needed.

Digital enlargements of some of the more spectacular and interesting prints were ordered by mill management to be hung in corporate offices from Vancouver to New York and Tokyo. This work has been contracted to VisionWorks in Sidney, British Columbia which co-ordinates the scanning of these select images for high resolution output as well as framing.

To date, rough data gathered during the initial phase has been entered for 14,504 records with all two thousand photo cards (photos mounted on index cards with descriptions) now fully described and scanned along with nearly two thousand prints and negatives. Throughout this second phase, Bill Purver has been incredibly helpful to my staff and I am very grateful to him for not only stopping by to see the project and offer assistance, but also for his ever-ready e-mail help. Thanks Bill! Also, Kathy Bryce at Andornot Consulting has been very helpful in providing assistance with INMAGIC's Version 4 of DB Textworks, a product with which we are now well pleased. My two employees Juania Swanson and Emma Levez have turned out to be wonderful assets to the project, bringing both enthusiasm, intelligence, consistency, reliability, and speed to a massive undertaking. Above all, they work well as a team, which is so important in a largely unsupervised setting.

Today, the team continues to work on improving their daily production tallies as well as assembling a display for the local Town Centre Mall in Westview. At some point this year, it is hoped that a completed portion of the database can be placed on the Pacifica Papers web site so that the whole world can access and enjoy these amazing images. In the meantime, mill employees like John Campbell assist Juania and Emma in identifying mill buildings and machinery. He and others under the guidance of project leader Juania Swanson, have also been taking poor quality "magnetic or "sticky" albums and re-assembling the pictures in original order using acid-free pages and binders so that the hard copy prints will last for many more years to come.

In an era of corporate downsizing and low prices for pulp and paper, Pacifica Papers nevertheless recognizes the value of their photographic archives, to the extent that they have committed many tens of thousands of dollars to its preservation and dissemination. It is my hope, that their example will serve to inspire other corporations with long histories to preserve their documentary heritage and to establish records management programs which ensure that these records, whatever their form, are preserved systematically and, where possible, make them available to the public.

Trevor May received his MAS in May of 1995 and started Archivia Enterprises that June. He has been a private archives and records management consultant since that time, serving clients of all kinds, from museums, small archives, and non-profit groups to municipalities, small business and large corporations like Pacifica. Trevor has also worked for the BC Archives in Victoria (1999) and chaired the Central Saanich Heritage Commission and currently resides in North Saanich, BC.

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