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

Today Temple Libraries filled the 400,000th request placed in the E-ZBorrow program administered through the PALCI consortium. The book was requested by a patron at Penn State and the book is: A war of nerves : soldiers and psychiatrists in the twentieth century by Ben Shephard, Harvard University Press, 2001. Temple started participating in E-ZBorrow in the fall of 2000, and since then we have borrowed 17,833 books and lent 30,979 books through this program. If you are currently studying or working at Temple you may request any book through E-ZBorrow that is not available at Temple . You can request books that are available for loan at one of the 49 other participating libraries including Penn, Pitt, Penn State, Rutgers, Lehigh, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore. — Penelope Myers

Starting September 11 Paley Library will stay open until 2 am Sunday -Thursday. The circulation/reserve desk will also remain open so that you can check out books and reserve materials. This schedule will remain in effect until December 5th, when Paley Library will remain open 24/7 until finals are over. Questions? Call 215 204-0744. See http://library.temple.edu/about/hours for more information on library hours. –Penelope Myers

To login and use PALCI E-ZBORROW now all you have to do is use your new TempleID number (TUid). Until July 1 you had to type in your social security number as that was your Temple ID, and many of you were reluctant to do that for security reasons. That problem has disappeared with Temple’s switchover to a random number ID. E-ZBorrow is a program that the Libraries offer for you to search and request books unavailable at Temple. You can request books that are available for loan at one of the 46 other libraries in the PALCI consortium. These libraries include Penn, Pitt, Penn State, Rutgers, Lehigh, and the Tri-College Consortium. When the book arrives for you you’ll receive an email asking you to pick it up. Questions? Call Penelope Myers at 215 204-0749. –Penelope Myers