INDEPTH
What’s going on with volunteers in public library services?
Covid and the cost-of-living crisis have both crushed down volunteer numbers in public libraries, but not so much to counteract a decade of volunteer growth. Biddy Casselden, Assistant Professor in Information Sciences at Northumbria University, explains the trends emerging in the sector’s volunteer force and where they are heading.
BACK in 2013 we explored the phenomenon of using volunteers in public libraries in England. Because the government’s austerity policy was already seeing cuts in paid library staff, our research looked at the use of volunteers not only for value-added roles in libraries, but also as replace- ments to paid staff.
Results from that original study showed that experiences of volunteering varied from service to service. It also showed that library services anticipated that increasing volunteer numbers would lead to a num- ber of unintended consequences. The 15 services that responded to the original 2013 Delphi survey expected these unintended consequences to include falls in service quality and accountability, increased social exclusion, and blurring of boundaries between
whatstaffandvolunteersdo.
Tenyearslaterwewantedtofindout whether these predictions were accurate, therefore we carried out an online survey using a sample of English public libraries. The responses of 19 Library Services have provided us with a unique picture of how volunteer numbers have changed during the past 10 years, the ways in which volunteers are now being used, and updated our view on what management strategies work best for successful volunteer use identifying good practice.
Covid impact However, 2013-23 has not been a straight- June 2023
Biddy Casselden, Assistant Professor in Information Sciences at Northumbria University
forward decade. Taking a 10-year anniversary as a landmark for a review for any decade that includes a global pandemic, national lock- downs, a cost-of-living crisis, and a sudden digital transformation of society is bound to have some interesting outcomes. These have allinfluencedvolunteeringinpubliclibraries but have also re-mixed the trends that may have emerged over the past decade. However, one key trend remains, despite the upheaval: that overall, volunteer num- bers have increased in the past 10 years, according to 89 per cent of the library services surveyed. The increase in com- munity libraries in particular has led to highnumbers.Covidsignificantlyreduced volunteer numbers during the lockdown, and it is taking a while to recover to pre-pan- demic levels, however, now, post pandemic, volunteernumbersaresignificantlyabove the levels reported back in 2013. Over three quarters of library services reported their volunteering numbers had
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