With a little help from our friends

With the pranks packed up and the chocolate rabbits devoured, you’re probably staring at your computer screen, sighing, and wishing it were Memorial Day already. But I’m here to tell you about one more celebration that you should get excited for! National Student Employment Appreciation Day is April 11th and this month we here at the lab are highlighting some of our awesome student employees and the amazing work they do for us.

Student workers are an incredible resource for universities like IU. Not only do they help us accomplish more than we could ever do on our own, they also bring in new ideas and attitudes that get us thinking about and questioning our established procedures, and give us an opportunity to provide on-the-job training and experience to the next generation (I, as a former student employee, particularly appreciate this part)! Plus, they’re pretty fun to have around! But they don’t always get the recognition they deserve. We, at the Craig Lab, have had dozens of wonderful student employees over the years, but I want to take this opportunity to applaud our current four. So let’s check in and see what they’ve been up to lately!

Tyler works on some custom enclosures for a collection of Atari games.

Sylva and Ben breath new life into old, worn-out books with beautiful (and durable) new bindings.

Alyse and Lara discuss the contents of a Russian item (sometimes our students bring in skills we never even knew we needed, like the ability to read Cyrillic!)

Often the items sent to us are not actually old or damaged, but rather new items that require some type of treatment or enclosure before being sent to the shelves. One of the projects being undertaken by our students currently is the methodical scanning of publishing information from each one of these 60 small, Chinese comics. Once that is done they can then be attached to larger, more durable pamphlets without losing any information.

Alyse recently finishing creating folders for 641 music scores from the Tischler Collection of Israeli and Jewish Composers.

Of course, our students do so much for us that anything I show you is necessarily only a small sampling of it. They are endlessly dedicated, inquisitive, and amazing! From all of us here at the E. Lingle Craig Lab, THANK YOU!