Written by Cindy Wahl and Suzette Schmidt of the Preservation Services unit.
Student employees are an important staffing component of the Preservation Services section of the Preservation Department at Iowa State University Library. The unit has 3 staff employees, and with the volume of work being sent to and from the vendors, the students help make the workflow smooth and consistent.
Students are responsible for the filing of periodicals when they are received from our Serials Acquisitions department. They sort and organize the issues prior to taking them to our Periodical Room or the General Collection for filing with the rest of the unbound issues. While filing the periodicals, they also check the titles to see if there are now enough older issues on the shelf to pull and return them to staff in Preservation Services to have them prepared for binding. In addition to pulling periodicals for binding while filing, we now have in place an electronic system where we can search, sort, and print out a list of periodicals that are now ready to be bound. The student uses that list to organize and forward periodicals to staff for binding.
There is a continual flow of work to be delivered and retrieved to other areas of the library and students are the legs for transporting these items. With our Preservation Department being housed on two different floors and other departments spread throughout the five floors of the library, the students are valuable in moving work from floor to floor and department to department.
Preservation Services works with a variety of vendors for binding, reformatting, and mass deacidification, which all require packing and unpacking of volumes. Students assist with this task while staff prepare the paperwork to be included with the shipments. At times the volumes being shipped need a page-by-page review, and the students help with this process by noting any repairs, which are then handled by staff. Upon receipt of the finished volumes, the new format is compared to the old volume by student employees to be sure the work is accurate and complete.
Some volumes being added to the collection need to have marking done to them prior to being forwarded for shelving. These pass through the Preservation Services section where the student is responsible for stamping the volumes with the Iowa State University Library possession stamp, moving the bar code to the appropriate placement on the volume, and, if necessary, adhering the title and call number labels to the spine.
As work flows and tasks change within the Preservation Services unit, it is always important for us to review the assignments and use our students in the most productive manner. They have shorter scheduled blocks of time, and their assistance is used best to help move the work through the unit and to help make the volumes available to patrons in a timely manner.
Library and Archives Preservation 