Seri Welsh, Class of 2026, and her team are speed shelving donated books.

Welsh is copresident of the student club Phoenix Sustainability Initiative (PSI) and leader of its Harper Library Project working group. The group has filled the shelves of Harper’s massive reading room with thousands of donated books, which are free for anyone to take.

But processing all those books is not an easy endeavor.

It’s a Tuesday evening early in Winter Quarter. In a pop-up sorting area in the west reading room, two tables are covered with long, flat plastic bins. The labels on the bins include “Course Books” (the most desirable category), “Art,” “Crafts, Cooking,” “Data, Stats, Math,” “Econ,” “Graphic Novels,” and “Religion,” among others.

About 10 volunteer shelvers show up on an average night, Welsh says. Counterintuitively, more show up at the end of the quarter, because “PSI members need to get their service hours in.” All members are required to put in three hours per quarter on one of PSI’s many projects.

The shelves in Harper are much tidier and emptier than usual, because the group gave away more than a thousand books at a book fair the week before. As well as free books, they sold “mystery boxes” as a fundraiser for PSI. The unopened boxes—full of treasures unknown—cost $3 each.

The sorting moves at a frenetic pace. Grayson Armstrong, Class of 2028, hesitates for just a moment over a book called Peace of Mind. “It’s very enigmatic,” he says. “I guess it could be religion.” He drops it into the Religion box.

Welsh rolls an unwieldy cart down to the basement and loads it up with boxes of donated books that are housed there, waiting to be shelved. On her return, she fields questions about which categories certain books belong in:

“Do we have math?” someone asks.

“With data,” Welsh says.

“What do I do about music?” someone else asks.

“We have art.”

She also flags books that are misfiled: “Why is this in games?” She holds up a copy of Glow Pucks and 10-Cent Beer: The 101 Worst Ideas in Sports History. “We have sports.”

Isha Mehta, Class of 2027, is surprised. “I didn’t think we ever got enough sports books.”

As the plastic bins fill, Welsh keeps the process moving: “Can someone shelve history?” “Can someone please put art up? But don’t collapse the shelf.”

“Law is in the middle back side,” she tells a student with a bin of law books. “East,” she directs another student, “as in towards the lake.”

Armstrong heads out to the main reading room with a full bin. When it comes to shelving, “I certainly do not have a process,” he says. He grabs up to six books at a time and slides them onto the shelves without even glancing at the titles. In less than two minutes, the bin is empty.

“There’s some random, really valuable books on the shelves,” Maddie Brown, Class of 2026, observes about the library’s holdings. A few handsome leather-bound sets stand out visually. But for readers who are willing to dig a bit, there are also vintage paperbacks, first editions, books signed by famous people, books with the names of beloved professors written inside.

At 6 p.m. sharp, the sorting wraps up. Before the volunteers depart, Welsh checks their availability later that week: “Can anyone do a book sorting tomorrow? Can anyone do a book sorting on Thursday?” Welsh’s senior thesis is due this week, but even with that pressing demand, the books are not going to sort themselves.