There are good days and there are bad days. This is a bad, sad day. A day I hoped would never come – or if it did, then in the far, far future when Registrar Trek is a myth the old registrars tell the young registrars about.

This project started out as a project of two people: Fernando and me. We had been exchanging thoughts for … well, almost exactly a year. We laughed, had fun, inspired each other and out of this, Registrar Trek was born. A small project at first. Two people writing articles and translating them in their mother tongue. When we went live in January, we soon gained more authors, translators and more languages. Registrar Trek grew rapidly, up to 37 contributors.

Rapid growth is great, but it’s difficult to keep an eye on everything. So, while I was busy managing new team members, adding translations and writing stuff, I didn’t notice that one team member was not happy with how things were going. A very important team member, my Captain (we often joked that his role model was Captain Jean-Luc Picard and mine was Admiral Kathryn Janeway).

The problem with working with team members from all over the world via internet is that you don’t meet people face to face. In the normal museum business your eyes or your intuition tell you that something isn’t understood the way it is said or that one team member is not happy. When this occurs, you could grab two cups of coffee, close the office door and sit down and talk. On the internet you have to rely on what you read from others, a very limited view of what is going on in another human being.

Maybe it was words I wrote that weren’t understood the way I meant them, maybe it was other things I did or said (or didn’t do or didn’t say), but the fact is that Fernando has decided to leave the Registrar Trek. No chance to reach him, no chance to set things straight, no chance to hold him back. I always said that if one of us stopped having fun, this would be the end of Registrar Trek. And in a way I still feel I don’t want to steer that ship without my captain, co-founder and co-administrator. So my first impulse was to close the project down.

But then, there are all of the great colleagues who offered their help with translations and the many people I know are working on contributions for Registrar Trek. And of course there are you, the readers of the blog, who keep us motivated to invest our free time in articles and translations. So, I feel a responsibility to carry on. I can’t promise that we can do it as well as we did before. Now, the captain is missing! But we will carry on.

Angela