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Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1993 14:34:48 -0600 (CST)
From: "Betsy McKenzie, St. Louis University" <MCKENZIEBM@SLUVCA.SLU.EDU>
Subject: Staffing for shelving/looseleafing
To: law-lib-request@ucdavis.edu
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Organization: SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY St. Louis, MO
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Thank you to all the folks who replied to my question earlier (and to
Kathy Belgum and Nick Triffin, thank you, personally. For some reason,
my thank you messages did not go through). I was amazed at the variety
of arrangements for these tasks! Looseleafing, in particular, seems to
be in Technical Services, Public Services and even Special Services!
There are full-time, part-time and student workers doing both of these
jobs. One reply commented that full-time shelvers were a problem because
it is very hard to shelve 8 hours/day, 5 days/week. But other libraries
with full-time shelvers seemed to have no comments about drawbacks. Some
of the full-time shelvers were called stack maintenance or stack super-
visors, which seems to indicate that these jobs include more than just
shelving. I was interested to find how few libraries have student
looseleafers doing other duties while looseleafing. At our library, we
have the circulation desk staffed with looseleafers, and have frequent,
horrendous errors in our looseleafs! At least one library had full-
time circulation staff do one or two looseleafs while covering the desk,
and mentioned that they counted on these professionals to be experienced
enough to avoid errors. I note also that the looseleafers who have no
other duties while looseleafing are more productive than ours who are
constantly interrupted by phones and patrons.
Schools that had regular part-time or full-time shelvers tended
to have a lower total number of shelving hours. It is difficult to
compare libraries, even by the volume count (even including the serials
count, which some respondents thoughtfully provided), because some have
heavier use than others, I think. But the hours for shelving ranged
from approx. 47/wk (1 FT + a shared student) at UC DAvis with 280,000
volume to 135+ hrs/wk at U. Mich. to 80 student hours/wk at Santa Clara
with 200,000 vols. (I forgot to say that U.Mich was 2 FT + students).
One respondent noted that looseleafing hours are going to be
somewhat meaningless, even with collection size, since I did not ask
how many looseleaf titles libraries had. Even so, I think the replies
are useful (at least I can attack the practice of using looseleafers
to staff the circulation desk!). At Iowa, they have the Special
Services Dept., which looseleafs and assists students with video
playback of courses (Iowa has videotaping facilities in all classrooms
in their very beautiful, new, hightech law school). They start the
year with 120 student hours/week (Kathy Belgum very realistically
took drop-out into consideration in her reply). At U. Mich, there
is 1 FT looseleafer and 2 PT (whose hours were not specified). In
contrast, Santa Clara, for instance, had 30 student hours/week, plus
a few titles assigned to circulation desk full-timers. One respondent
has a filing service, which works very well (after trying one that did
NOT work out well), and estimates that about 30 hrs/week go into their
looseleafing. Another respondent mentioned that they had costed out a
filing service, and discovered that they could afford an in-house full-
time filer for what the filing service would charge.
I hope this summary is helpful to people on the list. I very
much appreciate the people who took the time to send me their informa-
tion! Now, we have to sell this to our Dean! (Wish us luck!)
Betsy McKenzie
St. Louis University
Law School Library
mckenziebm@sluvca.slu.edu
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