One of the greatest resources that we have at the APRL is our volunteers, who regularly work on necessary tasks to maintain the services and collections of the library. The most helpful tasks include repairing and mending used materials in the collection, processing incoming donations that are either included in the collection or resold, shelving journals and auction catalogs that come to the library via subscriptions or donations, and any number of other tasks that arise in the library.
The three volunteers who came last week (Charlie Belair, Paula Belair and Dick Colberg) and one the week prior (Tom Bienosek) have been volunteering with the library for nearly ten years, along with a new regular local volunteer (Vince Costello) who has recently joined the group. All of these volunteers have been regular attendees of Volunteer Work Week held annually at the APS. Since the event was cancelled this year, they decided instead that they would come and participate in their own, unofficial version.
While here, they worked on various library-related projects including:
- Sorting through our backlog of donations to identify what was needed for the APRL collections. (Dick Colberg)
- Working on an index of journal articles that can then be added to the Article Index of the library's online catalog. (Charlie Belair)
- Processing one of our archival collections. (Tom Bienosek)
- Processing the library's collection of posters (Paula Belair)
- Weeding our journal collection and adjusting our shelving to make space for new items. (Paula Belair)
We also have several other regular volunteers over the year who work on other projects. One of our regular volunteers (Karen Robbins) organizes and processes the used books for sale in our bookshop. These are books that we receive as donations but that we do not need for our collection. Members can search our online catalog to find these used books for sale, you just have to click on the used books for sale tab at the top: (http://1549.sydneyplus.com/final/Portal.aspx?lang=en-US).
Other important activities that our regular volunteers also help with is completing collection surveys of our archival materials (Vince Costello, Bill Monsell, Kitty Wunderly) and the repair and mending of materials (Kitty Wunderly, Ellen Peachy). In addition, we have several volunteers who help us with indexing philatelic newspapers and journal articles. This is a project that can be done from home, so if you or anyone you know is interested in volunteering your services as an article indexer for the APRL and helping us to increase the accessibility of the library and its resources, you can contact our technical services coordinator Marian Mills at mmills@stamps.org. We appreciate all of the work that our volunteers do to keep the APRL organized and maintained.