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Another semester in the books, another opportunity to thank our student workers who help Special Collections & Archives in many capacities. They support our professional staff’s work related to moving collections, repairing and creating special housing for materials (especially books), describing and organizing materials, putting those descriptions online so they’re easier to find and understand, and providing reference and research services. Since we do a variety of tasks, most of our student employees also carry out a large range of tasks.

These tasks include but are by no means limited to:

• shelve books and collection boxes
• help us make sure every box and book is identified (big fans of labels here!)
• greet researchers in our sixth floor Research Room (ZSR625)
• answer calls and questions at the desk, directing requests that they can’t answer to full-time personnel
• support the physical rehousing and intellectual description of our materials
• create detailed collection inventories in spreadsheet form
• enter information into our collection management tools, which in turn populate our collection descriptions online
• repair books from the general collection
• create boxes and folders for books
• ask great questions while doing all of the above, which makes our descriptions, conversations, teaching, and other outputs more informed and thus more useful

Thank you to our student employees for their labors: Iman Ahmed, Natalie Cascario, Sydney Comstock, Olivia Field, Faith Geraghty, Megan Nigro, Riley Richards, and Chyanne Thompson-Quartey. We’ll meet back here next semester, with an even longer list of collections with newly available or updated descriptions!