The end of the school year is near, which means it’s time for people to claim items they have lost on Iowa State’s campus.

Whether it’s the Memorial Union or Parks Library, many on-campus buildings hold students’ lost and found items in special places — at least for awhile.

Laura Harms, main desk clerk at the Memorial Union, said lost and found items are kept for three months, and then “donated to a charitable organization,” if not claimed. Sack lunches are luckily only kept for a day.

A rubber shark’s head was once left at the Union, after a student group used it as a prop.

Every item without a home turned in at the Memorial Union follows the same procedure. Items are logged in a book with a date and description.

The hotel’s lost and found is separate but handled in the same manner. People have to show identification — unless, of course, that’s what was lost — and also sign for the item to retrieve it, Harms said.

Sometimes items are donated to an organization on campus that would find them useful. Chinese dictionaries were turned in and later given to the Chinese Resource Center.

Harms said, “If there’s a name on an item,” the Union officials make “every attempt” to find the owner of the item. They’ll even go to the trouble of e-mailing people if they can find the person’s e-mail address.

Harms said if the item “looks sentimental” or valuable, they may keep it longer, and will sometimes take inquiries about items in case they are turned in to the desk later.

Not every building keeps items as long as the Memorial Union. Parks Library only keeps items for 24 hours. Items are picked up by a messenger each day at 3 p.m. and taken to a central lost-and-found station in Alumni Hall.

Joan Mueller, program assistant for the public services and collections division at Parks Library, said, “five to 10 items” are left in the library each day and an estimated “75 percent of those items” are claimed by the owner at Alumni Hall.

Judy Minnick, the assistant registrar, works with the central lost and found in Alumni Hall. Minnick said, the majority of the items there come from Parks library. Lost and found items in Alumni Hall are kept for “at least one semester,” Minnick said.

Minnick said the four by six closet, where the items are kept, is “fairly full now, and gets “fuller as the weather gets warmer,” because “people forget about winter items.”

They also take many measures to return items to people. A wallet was lost in October 1995 and was found in a parking lot by a groundskeeper. The owner was found by identification in the wallet and returned through a friend who was an ISU student.

“It’s kind of fun to help people out,” Minnick said.

At the end of the semester, unclaimed items are given to the Purchasing Warehouse on campus, which sells the items in a sale once a week. Minnick said items sold are “basically anything (left) that’s not really personal.”