On Thursday, April 15, 2021, after a massive effort involving many people and nearly 700 work-hours, the “Back Issue Periodical Shift” project on the Lower Level of Duane G. Meyer Library was completed!

In Fall 2019 Access Services was tasked with shifting the entire Back Issue Periodical collection to consolidate space in the compact, movable shelving by leaving growth space for only those journals for which the MSU Libraries had active subscriptions. Following some initial analysis of the collection, the shift began in mid-January 2020 with all students being trained “on-the-fly”.

Good progress was made until the week of Spring Break in March of last year, then the pandemic lockdown began on March 26th. Beginning on June 1st when the Student Managers returned to work, they diligently worked on the shift for the next two months. For a couple of weeks in August, two full-time staff members, Chris Edwards and Amy Hankins, assisted as well before beginning their jobs in the Testing Center. Also, Karen Durden of Access Services contributed some of her time toward working on the shift. Throughout the fall semester and into the Spring of 2021, many student employees spent many hours working on the shift, and some had to be re-trained, because it had been several months since the last time they had worked on it.

Dan Rose, the Shelving Supervisor/Stacks Manager for the MSU Libraries, is immensely grateful for and proud of the hard work that everyone did on this immense and difficult project. He thanks the Student Assistants, past and present, the Student Managers, past and present, and the part-time and full-time library staff members who contributed their time and effort to get this project completed.