Mondays are fine
Kyle will be home any minute! I’m so excited.
Work went pretty well today. I let my intern loose to do real work (after about 3.5 hours of training) and she did great. Cataloging isn’t exactly the hardest thing anyone has ever learned to do, and she’s done a little bit of it in a class before, so I decided the best training would be actually working in our database. The nice thing about PastPerfect is that it’s super standardized so it’s easy for most people to learn. But, as with all museums and standardized databases, we’ve gotten in the habit of using it a certain way, favoring certain fields over others, and maybe using a few features to add more work. I’m not quite sure that we use it to the best of its ability, but it’s still a good system.
It turns out that I don’t really enjoy training. I think it’s mostly just that I’m so new at it, but I feel like I can’t quite strike the balance of what is over-explaining and what is under-explaining. I told James the other day that my problem is either that I’m actually smarter than everyone else so I don’t explain enough of what needs to be done and/or that I think I’m smarter than everyone else so I explain too much. It’s difficult to strike a balance. When I was trained, I felt a little overwhelmed by wanting to get to actually doing the work, so if I can avoid that feeling by teaching a little at a time, I think I’ll be better off. Also, I’m in the market for a “how to train volunteers” workshop. Hopefully a volunteer center will offer that.
I also have an education workgroup going right now and they seem to be making real progress on this travelling trunk that we’re doing. I’m so glad we’re finally getting programming churned out. And after October, I’m geared up to write another grant. I think this one will focus on our textiles collection and should be really good for us.