As another academic year ends it’s time to appreciate and praise the work of the hundreds of student assistants who work for us in all of our libraries and make it possible to do everything we need to do to serve our Temple community.

There are students working in our libraries every hour we’re open. In the case of many of the branch libraries student assistants keep the libraries open on evenings and weekends. In Paley Library students work in every department. They performs tasks as varied as answering phones during staff lunch hours; delivering important documents to the Provost’s Office; delivering mail; helping ship items going to the bindery; staffing the help desk and installing software and hardware in the Systems and Technology department; working in the current periodicals,government documents, and micromaterials unit, including staffing the ground floor desk, processing government documents, and refiling micromaterials. With our special collections, including rare books and Urban Archives, students help with many projects to make these collections accessible to our users. In the Access Services areas of Paley – circulation/reserve, interlibrary loans, and the stacks – student assistants make it possible for us to offer such critical services as e-reserves, and PALCI E-ZBorrow, activities where we rely heavily on students to do processing and scanning. In the stacks, students shelve thousands of books a week and are involved in year-round shifting projects. In interlibrary loans, students are processing and filling requests and wrapping hundreds of books a day to be shipped to libraries all over the country.

Thank you to all our student assistants. We couldn’t do it without you.

–Penelope Myers