Success With Library Volunteers

Covering principles, practical guidelines, and best practices for establishing and operating a successful library volunteer program in any type of library, this is a must-have resource for the 21st-century librarian. In these tough economic times, librarians must maximize the potential of their volunteer programs. This innovative guide not only provides readers with the practical information they need to recruit, manage, and retain effective volunteers, but also demonstrates how to create a dynamic volunteer program—one that offers purposeful work and emphasizes rewards rather than rules and forms. Illustrated by best practices, this book also offers practical guidelines for evaluating the success of a volunteer program—in terms of the library's benefit, and in terms of the experience from the volunteer's point of view.

Covering principles, practical guidelines, and best practices for establishing and operating a successful library volunteer program in any type of library, this is a must-have resource for the 21st-century librarian. In these tough economic times, librarians must maximize the potential of their volunteer programs. This innovative guide not only provides readers with the practical information they need to recruit, manage, and retain effective volunteers, but also demonstrates how to create a dynamic volunteer program—one that offers purposeful work and emphasizes rewards rather than rules and forms. Illustrated by best practices, this book also offers practical guidelines for evaluating the success of a volunteer program—in terms of the library's benefit, and in terms of the experience from the volunteer's point of view.

Quality volunteers can make a world of difference in today's library, and this hands-on guide gives you everything you need to maximize your library's services and build a bridge between your library and the community it serves.

This guide will show you how to reinvigorate your library's volunteer program using your community as a resource. Volunteers are essential to a library's well-being, but running a volunteer program is a complicated task that could often be done so as to bring more benefit to your library. This book draws on the author's decades of experience in public libraries and the nonprofit arena, and on cutting-edge professional trends in volunteer management, to show you how to tap into each of your volunteer's talents and match them to your library's needs. Providing multiple tactics for improving your library's volunteer program, the book covers redoubling your recruitment efforts to attract more volunteers, more logically assigning roles, and growing your relationships with volunteers. In addition, it addresses common problems with volunteers and potential barriers to success and explains how to overcome them. No matter what size your library, its volunteer staff, or its budget, this practical book will help you to streamline your volunteer program and more effectively engage the community to transform your library into a flourishing community center.

Volunteers are crucial to the daily operation of any library. Finding and retaining the right people, motivating them and matching their skills with projects is challenging. This collection of 30 new essays brings together the experiences of numerous individuals across the U.S., providing ideas, projects and best practices for volunteer recruiting and management. The contributors—among them library board members, heads of special collections, directors of state library associations, outreach coordinators, archivists and researchers—discuss a broad range of topics in five sections: recruitment and retention; policies and process; mentoring and empowering; placement, programs and responsibilities; and outreach.

Faced with ever growing patron demands, tight budgets, and limited personnel, libraries are relying more and more on volunteers to assist the paid staff. But for every professional who "manages" volunteers there is a horror story--a "problem volunteer" who lacked the talent, commitment, team spirit, personality or available time to do the job. How does the busy librarian develop and manage a successful volunteer program? This is the guide to implementing and managing a volunteer program tailored to the needs of the individual library. Issues such as recruitment and placement, training, development, and evaluation, and the "challenging" volunteer are discussed. Sample applications, advertisements, press releases, job descriptions, and skills and aptitude tests are also included.

This book helps the library get the most from volunteers, whether creating a program from scratch, or just refreshing what has been created for the library. It looks beyond the scope of the library to include information on partnering with community organizations to provide volunteer opportunities to library volunteers on a broader scale.

Volunteer management has many challenges, not the least of which is how we study it and view it. Academics examine it from a variety of disciplines and practitioners experience it in a variety of contexts. However both approaches have limitations. In academia we go to public administration schools to learn about public and nonprofit management, to business schools to apply the principles of private enterprise to nonprofit management, to sociology departments to study the phenomena of volunteerism, to psychology departments to understand the motives of volunteers, and economics departments to examine the value or economic worth of volunteerism. The liability of the academic approach is the segmentation of study and research into departmental areas. The study of volunteers and volunteerism needs to cross all of these organizational and discipline boundaries to be fully appreciated and understood as a field of interest. In contrast, practitioners view volunteer management from their own unique experiences. They try to gauge success in volunteer management based on what they have encountered in particular organizations, towns, cultures, and countries in which they work. As important as these insights are, they are difficult to generalize beyond local settings. Just because an individual has been successful in working with volunteers, it does not mean that the lessons learned in one situation can be translated to others under all conditions. The target audience for this volume is anyone who manages volunteers. The goal of the volume is to demonstrate the breadth of thought on volunteer management, both across disciplines and a wide range of settings in which volunteers work.