Hello everyone! My name is Laura Dees, and I work as an archive assistant in the Biddle Law Library. Here are a few things about me:
Now that my introduction is over, here are some things I have to say about my job. As an assistant to the archivist, I help with inventorying and processing collection items as well as helping to work on the LibGuide. I have never had archival experience before this position, so the things I have learned from working at Biddle are initially always foreign to me. Working on the recently donated George Treister Papers collection was maybe the first truly independent project I have had so far, as I was involved or handled all aspects of dealing with, processing, and storing the collection other than the initial accession.
I feel that both the experience working at Biddle, and more specifically the ability to work with a collection like this on my own has challenged me to improve my abilities to organize things both in physical space and in a mental layout. I also feel that as an anthropology major, the attitude I need to use to approach both an unfamiliar collection or the artifacts from another society is the same; I go in with no assumptions, and try to discern what the materials are telling me rather than what I want them to say.
To go in so blindly can sometimes be very challenging, especially when dealing with complex or confusing materials. I did experience something similar to that when working with the George Treister Papers in that there were materials I had an incredibly difficult time understanding. For example, included in the collection are things such as handwritten notes taken during conference presentations, correspondence with people in his field, or brochures from various conferences he attended. These items are not placed in any obvious physical, causal, or chronological order, so weeding through every piece of paper and being able to connect the ties proved to be a very daunting task. However, once the pieces finally came together, I had an idea of the order of correspondence and which notes go with which brochures, and they actually began to paint a very rich picture of creating, going to, and reflecting on these conferences he attended. Much like in the way anthropologists must create a narrative from the objects they have of the pasts, archivists do the same in that creating an intellectual order or relationship between the pieces of a collection conjures a narrative about the individuals involved in its creation. 
In short, I see that my time with Biddle, working on the numerous things that I have, has enabled my ability to create strong ties between items as well as intellectual concepts about them. Despite the challenges, I really enjoy my work here, and feel that it is helpful for the perpetuity of the study of the past and am looking forward to the things ahead.
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