Student Worker at the Archives

Being a student worker for the archives in the Memorial Library at Minnesota State University Mankato, has provided me with great experiences, and only positive experiences in general. During my time as a student worker, I have not only been able to develop my personal leadership skills, but also observe fellow student workers and university faculty who exemplify what good leadership looks like. Moving forward with what I have learned from this experience, I hope to incorporate the knowledge I have gained from working at the archives into my personal leadership practice.

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The objectives of working at the archives varied based on the department for which I was working; however, in a general sense the goal was to continually work on large projects and give priority to more pressing projects, which were usually determined by university faculty and administration. Throughout my time at the Memorial Library, I have worked as an archive digitization student worker and an archive student worker. Prolonged projects in digitization would be scanning and ingesting, entering and uploading information to accompany a file, photographs and negatives from the photograph collection. More pressing projects would be scanning requested items that are not uploaded to university databases or going to the university records center to pull requested files for faculty. As an archive student worker most projects revolve around processing new collections, organizing new materials and creating collection guides so they can be tracked. Projects that would have priority over general processing projects were when researchers or faculty requested the assistance of the archives in research, or when we set up exhibits in the library.

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There are two different types of personal leadership I have had to develop while working at the archives. The first type was more of an individualistic leadership style given the leadership style of my bosses. In both the digitization and the archives divisions my bosses assigned tasks and made sure all the student workers knew how to complete them, but otherwise we were largely left to be self-directed.  Doing work unsupervised compelled me to take leadership by completing my individual tasks in a timely and correct manner. One example of personal leadership being used was by me and two fellow student workers who created a records board for scanning projects. The sheer number of materials that need to be scanned can be intimidating and doing the same scanning process repeatedly tended to get tedious. To ensure we did not get overwhelmingly bored, we decided to have a friendly competition where we made a records board of who scanned, ingested, or scanned and ingested the most materials in a single day. We also had the shared goal of scanning and ingesting over two-thousand images, the previous record in an academic year, which we were able to shatter thanks to the individual competition. This system working can be attributed to strengths that we as student workers shared such as, competitiveness, responsibility, and teamwork. Since we were working as a team at the end of the day, we were able to use competition to encourage each other instead of having someone up and someone else down. We operated under the motto “quality and quantity over quantity or quality”, to remind ourselves we had to remember to still be producing work to the best of our abilities and not just ingesting material at the expense of potentially excluding important metadata. This system may seem silly and redundant, but in retrospect it allowed us to use individual leadership in a unique way to make work more enjoyable and ultimately resulted in everyone staying focused and motivated, consequently greatly increasing our output collectively.

The second type of leadership I have exercised at the archives is informal group leadership. This leadership applies more for group projects and was more common during my second and third year at the archives, as I was able to share my experience with new student workers. If other student-workers needed help finding something or learning how to do something new I would answer their questions to the best of my knowledge. The best example of this was helping teach new student workers how to process new collections, the organizational style we used and the information we included for each respective collection.

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 By far the greatest leadership experience I have had while working at the archives in the Memorial Library has been through the observation of my bosses. All the archives’ staff go out of their way to make sure their student workers are equipped for success, both academically and in their personal lives. For me, this was often done through daily check-ins where they would inquire what was going on and then listen to me vent and give me advice whenever necessary. Knowing that your bosses genuinely care about you and will do everything possible to help you be successful, helps immensely with having a phenomenal work environment and managing the inevitable ups and downs people experience in life. I can replicate this in future careers in a variety of ways. If I were to become a teacher, I would take a more invested approach and try to adapt my teaching style depending on the students in the class. Also making sure students know I want them to succeed in and outside of the classroom would be a huge point of emphasis, so they would want to participate instead of feeling required to. Similarly, if I were to pursue a law career of some sorts, I would want to establish a relationship with any clients to get the best understanding of their needs and how to approach the situation based on their preferences and the circumstances.

If I had to identify the singular most impactful leadership experience throughout my time at college, it would be working at the archives. Perhaps, this is because this leadership style I am observing unequivocally espouses the values I see as most important in life and leadership. I would feel comfortable going to the staff at the archives for advice because they have made it abundantly clear they care about their student workers. In a workplace that exercises this more personal type of leadership, the environment of connectedness is used to foster development and create trust. When formal leaders go out of their way to help others, whether that be clients or employees respect and trust are naturally built. More than once I witnessed staff at the archives set aside their responsibilities to help students or faculty who requested assistance, sometimes even going out of their way to meet unrealistic deadlines. Seeing their dedication to helping others made me, as a worker, want to likewise go out of my way to always help them and show reciprocal effort so they know I appreciate and respect their leadership. When I find myself in a formal leadership position one day, the archives staff exemplifies the type of leader I strive to someday become, one who goes out of their way to help others and make them feel valued. Whether that is by proving to be a reliable source of help or going above and beyond in making sure those you are leading know that you care about them and want them to be successful.