It's been a while since I've even thought about this blog, and that's a fair commentary on my personality. I'm not one of those people who posts about life obsessively (and we all have friends who post multiple times a day to Facebook, prompting me to think "What are you doing at work?") It's also a fair assessment of the curse of being a lone arranger. I simply do not have the time to post about what I do in the archives because I'm working.

So there have been changes: my long-term student assistant graduated in May and I asked the work program office not to assign anyone yet. When I first arrived here, the archives crew was sort of a dumping ground for the late-comers, the health challenged and the oddballs. And, I had no clue how to work with people who had no clue how to do archival work. Sure, I'd been a supervisor before, but of an another archivist who merely had fewer years of work experience. In truth, the archivists I supervised were probably better trained that I could ever claim to be. They were easy to supervise. "Go. Do." And they went and did.

But a student, a teenager entering college for the first time can barely recognize what's going on in their life, let alone enter a work situation and DO. First off, going to college is radical, man. Everything is changing; they're changing; life around them is so different, and it's a recipe for disaster. For some of my student I felt like I functioned like a mom rather than a supervisor. I'm sure the archives and I were a complete mystery to them. And that was completely my bad. I didn't have a clue about where to begin.

I now have a training manual for beginning training workers, a kind of "best of" articles of how to be an archivist. I also know that they need to have a good grounding in the college's history, and I have resources for them to watch/read/study. Best of all, they get work credit for everything I tell them to read/watch. Plus, there's always an index, an inventory, a finding aid, a document to enter into Word.

Today's email brought to me the admonition that I must now have a work manual for my crew and it has to be posted online on Moodle, which made me think about all the times I've failed as a work supervisor. Maybe this is the time I finally figure out how to do it. And while that takes away from the stack of stuff I should process or describe or enter into Word, it's also pretty important part of my job, whereas blogging is not. Thus, the clash between paying attention to social media and all its implications, and the interior work of the archives. For all that we put out there for the world to read, the really important work needs to be within and unread by the world at large. Maybe another day I'll post that work manual out 'there'. But for now, the hard work is to think about what it means to train a young person to care for historical records how I can best do that.