About me

Hans van der Boom
Hans started reading Anne McCaffrey's Pern books during the late 1970's and subsequently became and has been a Pern and McCaffrey fan ever since. In real life Hans isHead of Communication and PRfor aorganisation active in the health field and social services (part-time) and a self employed, professional historical researcher and genealogist with hi own small publishing house (Van der Boom & Slijkerman). He is a book lover in extremis and has been reading and collecting science fiction and fantasy books now for over thirty years. His other interests (in books too) are history, genealogy and languages, and together with his science fiction and fantasy book collection his library contains several thousand volumes. Hans is fond of saying: "If I want to read fiction, it has to be fiction all the way", so ordinary novels and the like are only to be found in his wife's extensive library...
Hans got involved with Pern on the internet in the late 1990's and when Anne McCaffrey started a website of her own with a forum board and chatroom he quickly became involved, first as a host and later as an administrator, webdesigner and technical administrator for Anne's website under Alec McCaffrey, Anne's oldest son. This all ended when Todd McCaffrey took over from his brother and the chatroom and forumboard were discontinued early 2005. Hans then set up, and became one of the administrators of the website that wanted to be the successor of the old Kitchen Table forumboard under the name The New Kitchen Table at the domain www.annemccaffreyfans.org. His friend of long standing and also former host and administrator of Anne's forum board, Cheryl Miller (a.k.a. Sariel) set up another forum board with the title A Meeting of Minds, and Hans quickly became a staff member there. He thought it best not to be on two administrator seats at the same time and discontinued his work for The New Kitchen Table.
Hans was promoted to the rank of Master Archivist by a panel of his peers in 2000. If you want to know more about this (and about Anne's congratulations for Hans), please visit the Master Archivist page.
Together with his friends Cheryl Miller and Anneli Conroy, Hans edited and published a commemorative book titled "40 Years of Pern" with essays of many friends, (co-)authors and fans which was presented to Anne at Eurocon 2007 in Copenhagen, Denmark on September 22, 2007 at Eurocon at which she wast Guest of Honour that year.
The year 2008 saw the 10th anniversary of Hans' Pern dedicated site on the internet, which started out as Elrhan's Pern Site but was soon know as The Pern Museum & Archives.

Master Archivist Elrhan
Elrhan is the invented Pern persona of Hans van der Boom, owner and operator of the Pern Museum and Archives.
Elrhan was apprenticed to the Harper Hall at quite a young age. However, although he has many different qualities he was not musical enough to become a Harper in the field of music. After a Turn or two of the obligatory musical studies he was employed (some prefer to say sent) to the Archivist Hall within his beloved Harper Hall and, always having had a love for the history of his planet, he became very happy there. He enjoyed his journeyman posting at Benden Hold, relishing the chance to access both the Hold's and Weyr's old records and... being so close to the famous wines. Elrhan is especially adept at reading and preserving the older records as well as the younger ones. As a reward for his achievements in the archival world on Pern he was awarded a green fire lizard which he called Sarynth and who is named after a fellow master archivist by the name of Sariel, who is admired by Elrhan very much. In the imaginary world of Pern Elrhan and Sariel both reside in the new Archivist Hall at Landing.