Helen

When I was a notetaker in theory the notes were done at the end of the lecture but it was in fact more complicated than that.  We had to take them back to the office and there they often needed to be photocopied for all the other DSA students that needed notes in that lecture.  There could be anything from 2 to maybe 6 students at times!  Some would want coloured paper so I would have to remember to photocopy say 1 set on green, for example, one set on pink, maybe the rest on white etc.  Handouts too needed photocopying if they had notes on them.  Some handouts were large and covered all the lectures for that semester on that topic so I would need to remember to put the originals in a separate place where the next notetaker who was covering that series could find them.  Any future changes/cancellations had to be recorded.  Each copy of the notes was put in the folder for that student who would collect them later.  We had to write on a list that was in each student's folder the name/date of the lecture and name of the notetaker to show the notes had been made and there was a space for the student to sign to show they had collected them.   This admin for a day's lectures could easily take an hour or slightly more.  I would always do my admin at the end of each day, so I would start at 6pm or if I had covered a 6pm lecture then I would start at 7pm.  So my notes were always available by 8 to 8.30pm the same day.  Some notetakers could not stay that late so they would come in between 7am and 8am the next day to complete the admin before the start of their next set of lectures.  For those that could not stay late or come in that early then they would try to fit in the admin the next day when they had gaps between lectures.  

I would say most notes were therefore ready for collection by the end of the next day but the deadline was 48 hours after a lecture just to be safe.  

Students seemed happy with this.  Some collected their notes just once a week, some would collect only just before their exams, others would collect several times a week.  But 48 hours would seem reasonable.