Eira Tansey @TeamMidwest@glammr.us

so much quit lit and very little out there talking about what it's like to be the one left behind. it is a lot to carry.

it's hard enough seeing this trend at my own institution, but i've always relied on "well at least i have a deep bench in my professional network" and now the trend is heading for that area too. it just feels like the connective tissues in our profession are slowly disintegrating.

i am seeing more and more people i entered into the profession with leave right when we're all entering the beginning of mid-career and this kind of attrition makes me profoundly sad. sometimes it's due to personal factors, sometimes it's due to institutional factors, often it's due to systematic lack of jobs and ability to move around.

this is a subtweet of everyone and everything including myself

Archivists get better class politics and/or learn how to do quantitative data analysis beyond surveys challenge 2021

i have read the word "seminal" 3x already today and honestly it needs to stop

i am dealing with a THING that will hopefully be resolved by next summer MAYBE but also no one might step up and it might all fall apart (my friends know what I'm talking about) and I am going to just keep repeating this to myself for the next 6-9 months

saw someone on Ask a Manager say "you can't keep someone else warm by setting yourself on fire" and wow I'm still thinking about that four hours later

We just had our first group of students since March 2020 stop by to ask about the anthropodermic bound book, nature is healing.

at my last institution i trained tons of students on using Archon and it took like an hour and they were off and running. I still don't understand everything in ASpace and it's like if you look at it the wrong way something breaks and it takes an hour to figure out how to fix this. why. i cannot. please.

have never received speedier replies to my requests for help (seeking information on mystery people in photographs) than using the subject line "The archivists are stumped"

i really, really miss the simplicity of Archon oh my god. ASpace is like having a Ferrari when all you need is like a Corolla.

I have a budget line of $0 for a legal mandate to do RM, and here Harvard has $2 million for its University Archives. I have a lot of colleagues I like at Ivy League institutions, but with every ounce of conviction I have in me: abolish the Ivy League https://sjobs.brassring.com/TGnewUI/Search/home/HomeWithPreLoad?partnerid=25240&siteid=5341&PageType=JobDetails&jobid=1902183#jobDetails=1902183_5341

i don't think there is any public regional university in the US that has 20 archives workers, let alone that many solely dedicated to its university archives. Harvard is really a different universe (this is from the new University Archivist posting at Harvard)

also, academic librarians seem kinda clueless about what's going on with K-12 librarianship. Spoiler alert: it's even bleaker than academic librarianship. What happens in K-12 eventually comes for higher ed.

yes it is death by a thousand cuts and I don't think anyone has gamed out the long-term implications of this except that at this rate it seems like our library will go extinct around the same time as the polar bears and manatees

the whole "a job only opens up when people retire" librarian/archivist discourse feels wildly optimistic to me because MPOW basically just eliminates positions after people retire and rarely creates new positions, and I know we're not the only institution that does this

also we don't really have any prestige institutions in town with more than half a dozen archivists anywhere (most are doing well if they have 3-4) so it's kinda nice to be able to talk shit about Big Fancy Institutions With Tons Of Staff and not hurt anyone's feelings but also so much for the future of cultural heritage

the Cincinnati archivist scene is pretty small and we finally had our first meetup in maybe almost 2 years and lots of stories about lost positions at various institutions across town that have not been replaced both pre- and post-March 2020. I am convinced our profession is at the precipice of a death spiral/extinction event, talk me off the ledge.

if i had infinite time and $$ I would start some kind of FOIA requestor proxy swap app that will match you with a fellow public sector worker who desperately wants to FOIA their institution but too scared of blow back to have their name attached to the request. If you match, you agree to fulfill each other's requests and the data goes back into the app for all to see.