Undergraduate work-study students are employed as circulation assistants and computer lab assistants. We have a hiring procedure and training (both for new assistants and ongoing). We schedule circ assistants so that new hires are not left alone without one of our two Circulation Supervisors present. We also use reference assistants (law students) to cover reference evening and weekend hours. Our senior reference librarian hires and trains them. These are not work-study funds but library funds. Lastly, our bibliographic control folks hire undergrad work-study students to reshelf books during the school year and other collection related projects.
we use law students as part-time circ desk attendants; they answer the phone, check in and out material, and process photocopy and fax requests, since these machines are within the sightline of the circulation desk. When there are no requests, they generally do their homework, especially late at night and on weekends. We always have at least one full time staff supervisor scheduled at the same time and our students do not open or close the library on their own.
We use students, part time only, both undergrad & law, W-S IF we can get them Circ. desk is mostly undergrads w/ the occasional law. Ref. desk is law wit 2 undergrads for copying/ILL mailing. Circ students open and close the library and work weekends ... students shelve, shelf read, shift the collection and loose-leaf. We find that, in addition to the law students, accounting undergrads are excellent at the more detailed work. Law students at the Ref. desk extend our ... They handle basic ref. Qs, answer the phone, help the ref. staff with faculty requests and in preparing teaching materials. The 2 undergrads at ref. help our ILL asst. with pulling materials, copying & mailing. They also help the ref. staff by Making copies, pulling books and delivering the items to faculty Offices, as well as going over to the undergrad library to get books for librarians/faculty.
We use students p/t to staff the circulation desk and do filing and shelving. Sometimes students open and close the law library.
we use students to be the second person at the Circulation desk. They handle circulation transactions, shelve, tattle-tape books, and are allowed to study if there are no other tasks to be done. They are work-study, and this year almost all of them are
law students. We often have undergrads or grad students as well.
We have a second group Library Fellows. They are law students who are
at least second years and have taken our Advanced Legal Research class.
They fill in at the reference desk, and help us with research projects
for faculty or for our own projects.
. We have several at the circulation desk and a couple that work at odd jobs, depending on their expertise. At the circulation desk, about half the student workers are undergrad and half are law students. The undergrads are important because law students all need to limit their hours around finals, just as more work is needed at the circulation desk. These students do loose leafs, shelve books, check books in and out, open the library on Saturdays and Sundays, and lock it up nightly. We have 10 student workers in circulation. Only one or two of them have keys to open with. We also hire one or two hire students with computer expertise to do things like work on web pages. These are often either undergrads who are getting an externship for a computer degree or law students who once had a career in computer science before deciding to come to law school. All of our students work less than 20 hours a week. We prefer hiring students that get work-study money.
They are supervised most of the time by either our daytime or evening circulation supervisor, but there are times when they are on their own. We aren't super busy, so it's worked out well for the most part.
We have non-law students in four areas:
Technical services Stacks maintenance Circ Desk Administration (mail, filing, etc.)
We also have law librarianship students (JD, getting MLS). They do rotations in circulation (5/hr for half a year), tech services (5/hours for half a year) and reference (5 hours a week all year).
We use work-study students and also hourly students. My student workers consist of law students, undergrads and also grad students. They all work part time as they are attending classes daily. They all work at the circulation desk, do filing, shelve books and straighten up the shelves when necessary. ... also trained to take care of Xerox machines and printers (such as clearing paper jams and adding paper to the machines). They are also trained to lock up classrooms and outside doors at night.
We use student employees extensively in our academic law library, particularly in Circulation and in Technical Services. They work at the Circulation Desk, both with and without permanent staff. They're responsible for answering phones and directing calls, checking materials in and out, making change, answering directional questions, shelving materials, and clerical duties such as photocopying and faxing. They close the library on some days, particularly on holidays when permanent staff is off duty. Our students are mostly undergrad and grad students who don't qualify for work-study, but who want/need part-time jobs. We take work-study students when they apply
we use student employees a lot. Students (Usually undergrad work-study, but also undergrad non-work-study and law students) handle most of our loose-leaf filing and shelving of books. Law students staff the circulation desk. We also use law students as reference assistants (primarily to answer the phone and do some of the
paperwork associated with ILLs... and in tech services. As far as how much responsibility we give them, generally the tasks we give them are baseline tasks, which don't require a lot of discretion. The exception to that, of course, is the circ desk workers, who are the only employees in the library at certain times of the week, and frequently have to use independent judgment. We try to prepare them for that by a) making sure they have comprehensive training as to all aspects of their job and b) encourage a positive mental attitude and good workplace environment.
One of my employees began as a 16 year old, answering the phone & assisting people with the copier, etc. working about 3 hours a day She now works about 30 hours per week. My other employee is also part-time and is a student Both of them now do virtually everything except complex reference work. They process the incoming materials, do the cataloging, shelving, etc. I have enough "paper trails" (unfortunately and fortunately) that no disasters have occurred (as they used to with older, less committed employees). HOWEVER, as they say, I had to kiss a lot of frogs first. A LOT of part-timers do not care, do not want to learn, are not reliable, etc. I used to work at a law school and also used students. The fact that they did not look on the job as even a potential career, they were much less focused & less competent.
We use both undergraduate work-study students and part-time law students. The undergraduate work study students stamp and strip materials, reshelf books, read shelves, file microfiche and pocket parts, and restock paper in the printers and copiers in the library. Most of our part-time law students work as circulation clerks, primarily checking books in and out. We have one who had had some previous library experience and he updates our loose-leafs and staffs the library by himself on the weekends. We have another law student who has a library degree who does Government Documents part-time.
...currently (and has) used student workers in the library. They are current students of the law school and are responsible for things such as shelving books, opening and closing the library, circulation, answering the telephone and doing some of the loose-leaf filing.
...employs law students at the circulation desk of the law library all of the hours that the library is open. They shelve books, do shelf reading and check out material. Most of the time, a full time employee is also around, but this enables us to do other things. The serials department uses a combination of law students and undergraduates to do loose leaf filing. None of our students are work-study.
I do you use law students (mostly on work-study but also on the library payroll) as part time Student Circulation Assistants. They usually work in the evening and on the weekends when the full time circulation staff are not on duty. There is a full time evening/weekend supervisor as well as Reference Librarians on duty when the students are working ... they are responsible include answering the phone at the circulation desk, checking in and checking out of materials, collecting fines, shelf reading duties and occasional photocopying for faculty. .. and are also responsible for opening and closing the library. Hours are generally from 8am to midnight. Prior to my joining the library, the students had responsibility for bar-coding material on the fly. After discussions with technical services, I took that responsibility away from the students. Some individual students are willing to assist the staff in the clerical aspects of interlibrary loans and perform quality work. These are the exception. I prefer to have duties about which students have any questions performed by the full time professional staff. As a result I have been limiting the duties of student workers to interaction with the student patrons.
We currently employ between 20 and 25 work-study students for various
public services functions in our library. These functions include
staffing the circulation desk, shelving and reshelving materials, and
monitoring the public areas of the library (including an off-site Clinic Library that supports our Law Clinics).Most of our work-study students are law students, but we do employ 3-5 undergraduates per year as well.
We hire approx. 25, mostly work-study, law students to work anywhere from a few hrs. to 20 hrs. per week (the majority are full time, a few go 4 yrs.) Until this semester the Tech. Serv. dept. had 1 or 2 students, as a trial they have none this semester. Students staff the circ. desk and assist the media dept.
We use lots of student employees -- they are usually undergraduates and they all have to have a work-study grant. Our student employees staff the circulation desk, reshelf books and do loose-leaf filing. The circ desk students work under the supervision of the Circulation Manager and the shelvers and filers work under the supervision of the Stacks Manager.
... we hire undergrads for circulation, stacks maintenance, and filing. At least some of them are hired as part-time staffers so they get benefits. The goal of this is to get them to stay for a long time so we have experienced people. Students can stay after they graduate until they get permanent jobs. At reference we hire law students as Graduate Research Assistants, who each work 8 hours a week at the reference desk (solo). We select them based on their grade in the first-year research course as well as their attitude toward providing service. They get tuition remission and a stipend. I have a GRA to help me with interlibrary loan. She gets the same compensation as the reference GRAs. Occasionally a law student is hired as a computer lab GRA (the lab is in the library).
I asked some of the people who answered my question about stack maintenance duties here is a summary.
As far as stack maintenance they do all the shifting of the books and that is quite often as Law books are updated often. They also do the dusting of the shelves which we try and go over every other week and then through the summer we take the books off all shelves and do a thorough dusting. We usually rotate doing the dusting during the week by doing one floor each week. We have three floors to take care of so it does keep us busy with dusting.
We assign one student to each floor of the lib. (we have 3), that student is responsible for all of the shelving on that floor. We feel that if they're trained properly and we monitor the accuracy of shelving, they keep up w/ the vol. of shelving and make few mistakes. We don't have students clean the books or shelves
Book and shelf cleaning has been a mixed bag over the yrs., at this time no one is cleaning the shelves and they're very dusty. In the past our maintenance/cleaning staff did it when they had time, and we contracted w/ a cleaning service at another time, we tried hiring work study law students to clean during a summer (didn't work out, they did not like the work), a couple of yrs. ago we hired a fulltime pub. serv. assistant and part of her duties was shelf and book dusting, w/ recent budget cuts we lost a fulltime pub. serv. position and had to reconfigure job responsibilities so there is no time for cleaning, not sure what's next for shelf/book cleaning Undergrad students do stacks maintenance. I think updating loose leafs is part of their job Occasional shelf reading or shifting under the direct supervision of a member of the circulation staff.
Yes. The undergraduate work study students stamp and strip materials and put them on the shelves, reshelf books that have been used, read shelves to make sure that they haven't gotten out of order, file microfiche and pocket parts. One of our law student circulation clerks updates our loose-leafs. I don't think that our undergraduate work study students pull superseded volumes off the shelves and discard them, though.
They do almost everything except strictly management decisions & training -- though they do help train interns and one another (one takes a class and comes back & teaches us).
They are occasionally asked to shelf read, but that is all.
our work study students do the following stack maintenance tasks:
Daily re-shelving of books and materials that have been used in the
library. Our patrons are asked NOT to re-shelve any materials, but
instead to leave them on carts and study tables so that staff can
re-shelve them in their rightful places.
Occasional shelf reading and "fronting" of materials to keep the shelves looking neat and organized. Pulling material from the shelves for displays, professor research, etc.
The students who work in the evening must spend one hour shelf
reading. We keep a list of the aisles that were last looked at. If a specific area is a huge mess, then we send students out to deal with that also. I have one or two students who I have trained in the fine art of shifting books when needed to make room for more books.
Shelving, shelf reading (when time permits), and special projects are the major stack maintenance projects.
In a pinch, with a good student, we might have them filing microforms. Sometimes large shifts of the collection, but more recently general reselling. We are retrospectively security stripping parts of our collection, but here that is run out of Technical Services (with student labor).
Yes, we have them periodically do shelf reads in the stacks and also, in the summertime, we use work study students to do moving projects.
Not so much. They may help out with a shelf reading project, but will need to be supervised for that sort of thing. We usually just leave stack stuff to the full-time circ folks.
They reshelf, but no real shelf reading etc., they used to once upon a time but not sure when they stopped and why. (I was here as a student then gone, now back as librarian). When I was a student worker here, we did learn to shelf read and had an assignment to spend 1 hour a shift, shelf reading and straightening.
They generally do not do stack maintenance. Sometimes they are encouraged to put away loose books or fix problem areas, but they don't really do it on a routine basis.
Yes. Under the supervision of the Stacks Manager (a Library Assistant position) and the Stacks Supervisor (a professional Librarian position) the students help in doing shifts and relocating books. We are currently trying to reorganize our on-site storage area (compact shelving) which is really a challenge! But hopefully, after to storage reorganization, we will be able to shift some older stuff from the stacks into storage thus making more room in the stacks for our ever-expanding collection.
To add a comment, I think that success is all in the attitude of the
employees -- we all share the same knowledge that the work needs to get done and we need to share the doing of the work -- cross-training in action!
Quite a bit, as far as shelf-shifting goes. As far as
walking around the library and, on their own, finding
congested places and moving books to relieve the congestion,
they don't do that. Basically we'll give them stacks
maintenance tasks that are straightforward to explain and
easy for us to monitor what they're doing -
They may help out with a shelf reading project, but will need
to be supervised for that sort of thing. We usually just leave stack stuff to the full-time circ folks.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 14 2007 - 20:45:41 PST