This is the second in a series of summer stories that give a peek at what happens on the Elizabethtown College campus when most students and many faculty and staff members are elsewhere. This week we talked to Barb Shank, Print Services.
Because far fewer students on campus mean less work, several Elizabethtown College departments close their doors during the summer months. The hot and humid season, however, is one of the busiest for Print Services.
“With graduation past and administrative assistants on summer break, we use May and June to regroup,” said Barb Shank, Print Services manager.
Then, she said, oodles of late-summer tasks kick in.
We do 10,000 impressions, then do the finishing and binding. It’s hands on.”
Housekeeping duties are first. Organizing end-of-month, end-of-quarter, end-of-year files is high priority, as is preventative maintenance and printer calibrations. “It makes the colors more accurate,” Shank said of the downtime machine tweaks. Also important is apprising the pricing schedule for the coming year, ordering paper and updating hardcopy files from the previous academic semester.
All that accomplished, the department begins to print and bind important documents for Summer Events and Summer Programs, Gretna Music and BCA. “We prepare BCA’s handbook for next semester,” Shank said.
In addition, summer is spent replenishing supplies of business cards, department stationery and envelopes. “There are title changes and new faculty members and new staff members,” she said.
From mid-July to early August “we start to see faculty members reaching out for course packs and manuals – biology, chemistry, education handbooks; social work field manuals. They are large orders.” Interestingly, the same amount of set-up goes into a job no matter how big or small. “The preparation to print is the same,” Shank said.
There are hundreds and hundreds of course packets and manuals to bind. Some of them, she said, are 100 to 200 pages. “We do 10,000 impressions, then do the finishing and binding. It’s hands on.” Much of the summer season sees printing for Admissions open houses and orientation.
Besides all the catch up work for on-campus clients, Print Services also spends a good portion of the summer caring for the needs of community members, Shank said noting that Print Services does not have the assistance of students over the summer. The department averages about 300 customers during the academic year and 200 per month over the summer, she said, listing typical warm-weather, off-campus clients as brides and grooms, not-for-profits, Church of the Brethren nursery school and the childcare center.
“We do laminating for the childcare center and work with the public library to make notebooks for recycled boxes,” she said. Several businesses also hire the College’s Print Services to create and print summer newsletters for their employees, and several local restaurants visit the department for seasonal updates.
In addition to printing, Shank, who has been with the College since 2002, said she is using some of her early summer down time to learn more about the department’s MAC and online programs … “to better serve the College and community.”