Cranking things up to Eleven, also Managing Volunteers #blogjune
Managing Volunteers.
I've been volunteering now for about a year or so in three different libraries and organisations and I've found it interesting how each organisation manages its volunteers.
The first thing I found interesting is the security around being a volunteer. For one volunteering job I'm around kids a lot and another I'm around kids occasionally(I work in the back office on a day few kids/families have appointments) so I had to have a blue card, then I had to show proof of ID and multiple other forms of ID to prove I am who I say I am, despite the people who I'm working with knowing me for years. So I was pretty glad I have a valid blue-card thanks to my work experience at QUT which sped up the process pretty much.
The State Library didn't need my blue card right away, I think they wanted me to have one but I don't remember having to hand it over at any point(I may have), but I did have to wait a lot longer to get a call back from them after I put my name down to volunteer there than I did for the places I volunteered at through friends and family connections.
The biggest problem I think with managing volunteers is finding things for them to do which doesn't put you in a position of liability or risk. As an example, I'm not left alone the library with students, I'm not a teacher, I don't have duty of care, that is their job. My job is filling the shelves, borrowing and returning books, testing the equipment from the 1980s to see if it still works and occasionally cleaning and sorting the shelves to make sure that they're neat. But when all that is done I really don't have much to do with my day other than tweak at the catalogue, make myself some Mi Goring Noodles, fix the printer, fix the other printer and pray I don't spam the entire school again by accident.
At the charity I volunteer at I'm usually in on Fridays so it isn't such a busy time for them, I'm working on a new Catalogue for their professional development Library as well as some other things to do with their toy library and little things around the place which needed doing but haven't been done because no-one really had the time to do it. So I have to make my own work and can go at my own pace. Which is a bit frustrating because I have nearly finished, but until I do I have no tangible results for what I've done and it feels like I haven't done anything. Doesn't help that I've had to skip a few weeks because of family stuff and illness so it is hard to get a momentum up and going with only one day a week.
At SLQ I wander around the exhibit making sure that people aren't breaking anything or doing anything untoward and helping out with questions. Some days we'll only have a few visitors an hour and there isn't much to do but there isn't anything else I could be doing because the organisation literally doesn't have anything else for me to do with this time and they also need me to be at my post just in case I am needed. And I don't mind not having much to do, I can Crochet now which is working out okay so far for me(see My Day below), and I can wander around the exhibits looking at the artefacts and reading the histories of the days gone past. I usually have someone to talk to as well, another volunteer most afternoons, so it isn't bad.
The problem is when I'm bored and volunteering I start to think of all the other things I could be doing, like playing Grim Fandango or going to the bank and you can start to wonder if it is worth sticking it out for those dull stretches. Full credit to the people who manage larger groups of volunteers because we really are a fickle bunch, like herding cats.
My Day.
Pretty decent day today. I woke up earlier than I have all week, felt fantastic, made my brother his dinner for the slow-cooker at 10am and set it to go before heading back to my dad's place to get my ID badge for the State Library and going into work via Train.
I stopped at the comic book shop on the way and got the latest comics including Saga, Harley Quinn, Section 8(Dogwelder Lives!) and Doctor Who. After that I walked across the river to the State Library to man the Distant Lines exhibit we've got running right now.
They've changed the interactive display in the exhibit to a crochet thing which I'm kind of working at to get the hang of but right now am pretty rubbish at it. Still it was something I can do with my hands while I wander around the exhibit, watching people, showing them how to search the database on occasion and generally keeping an eye on things, while crocheting.
A basic guide which still leaves me clueless.
After that was over I went down to the entrance of the library to do my customer exit surveys again, always a pleasure to get to meet the people using the library and get an idea of just what people use it for and how they're using it. I've done the survey so many times now I think I've worked out nearly every single possible use for every statistic the survey gathers. And it is quite interesting if I am right. Innocuous things like post-codes and what social media someone uses can tell us which social media platform to concentrate on for promotions and announcements and a lot of demographic information about the people coming in(plus we collect age and gender which narrows it down as well). I've had a lot of time to think about this stuff and it really does amaze me the ways I can think of to use the information and I'd love to know what other uses there are for it which I haven't thought of yet.
While I was doing the survey this lovely girl from America/France filled one out and told me about something called Permaculture which she was kind of studying by traveling around the world to observe it and other things. It ended up taking her almost twenty minutes to fill out the survey because we got talking about scarcity and the impact that having to impose scarcity on a society would likely have(I argued that if you want a permaculture you'd need to ration certain things because it isn't sustainable otherwise, she argued that this already happens and price is used to ration things out, which I disagreed with because someone who saves up or is stupidly rich can buy a lot of whatever and throw the system out of alignment, rationing would prevent anyone from getting stuff not just the majority, I'm sure there is a book idea in there somewhere).
After that was done I took a bus home, slept on the bus which is always fun, and then made dinner(Tacos! AGAIN!) for my dad and I and then drove to soccer training where we kicked the ball around for about an hour or so before packing it in and going back home. I did manage to tear my pants open while going for a ball and ended up having to play the entire game with half my pants hanging open. Which wasn't so bad but was followed by having to stop and buy petrol on the way home in a BP that I think I should never visit again.
Once I got home I mostly passed out asleep in my chair before getting up the energy at around 2am to write this. Tomorrow I have more volunteer work to do and then a post-exam get-together at Archives for all the people still at University. Archives is an interesting bar, they have a lot of varieties of beer there and the wallpaper is made from old comic books.
YouTube Clip of the Day.
Really looking forwards to this game, there are tombs, there is raiding and there is a girl who goes there to raid these tombs.
I've been volunteering now for about a year or so in three different libraries and organisations and I've found it interesting how each organisation manages its volunteers.
The first thing I found interesting is the security around being a volunteer. For one volunteering job I'm around kids a lot and another I'm around kids occasionally(I work in the back office on a day few kids/families have appointments) so I had to have a blue card, then I had to show proof of ID and multiple other forms of ID to prove I am who I say I am, despite the people who I'm working with knowing me for years. So I was pretty glad I have a valid blue-card thanks to my work experience at QUT which sped up the process pretty much.
The State Library didn't need my blue card right away, I think they wanted me to have one but I don't remember having to hand it over at any point(I may have), but I did have to wait a lot longer to get a call back from them after I put my name down to volunteer there than I did for the places I volunteered at through friends and family connections.
The biggest problem I think with managing volunteers is finding things for them to do which doesn't put you in a position of liability or risk. As an example, I'm not left alone the library with students, I'm not a teacher, I don't have duty of care, that is their job. My job is filling the shelves, borrowing and returning books, testing the equipment from the 1980s to see if it still works and occasionally cleaning and sorting the shelves to make sure that they're neat. But when all that is done I really don't have much to do with my day other than tweak at the catalogue, make myself some Mi Goring Noodles, fix the printer, fix the other printer and pray I don't spam the entire school again by accident.
At the charity I volunteer at I'm usually in on Fridays so it isn't such a busy time for them, I'm working on a new Catalogue for their professional development Library as well as some other things to do with their toy library and little things around the place which needed doing but haven't been done because no-one really had the time to do it. So I have to make my own work and can go at my own pace. Which is a bit frustrating because I have nearly finished, but until I do I have no tangible results for what I've done and it feels like I haven't done anything. Doesn't help that I've had to skip a few weeks because of family stuff and illness so it is hard to get a momentum up and going with only one day a week.
At SLQ I wander around the exhibit making sure that people aren't breaking anything or doing anything untoward and helping out with questions. Some days we'll only have a few visitors an hour and there isn't much to do but there isn't anything else I could be doing because the organisation literally doesn't have anything else for me to do with this time and they also need me to be at my post just in case I am needed. And I don't mind not having much to do, I can Crochet now which is working out okay so far for me(see My Day below), and I can wander around the exhibits looking at the artefacts and reading the histories of the days gone past. I usually have someone to talk to as well, another volunteer most afternoons, so it isn't bad.
The problem is when I'm bored and volunteering I start to think of all the other things I could be doing, like playing Grim Fandango or going to the bank and you can start to wonder if it is worth sticking it out for those dull stretches. Full credit to the people who manage larger groups of volunteers because we really are a fickle bunch, like herding cats.
My Day.
Pretty decent day today. I woke up earlier than I have all week, felt fantastic, made my brother his dinner for the slow-cooker at 10am and set it to go before heading back to my dad's place to get my ID badge for the State Library and going into work via Train.
I stopped at the comic book shop on the way and got the latest comics including Saga, Harley Quinn, Section 8(Dogwelder Lives!) and Doctor Who. After that I walked across the river to the State Library to man the Distant Lines exhibit we've got running right now.
They've changed the interactive display in the exhibit to a crochet thing which I'm kind of working at to get the hang of but right now am pretty rubbish at it. Still it was something I can do with my hands while I wander around the exhibit, watching people, showing them how to search the database on occasion and generally keeping an eye on things, while crocheting.
Click to viewA basic guide which still leaves me clueless.
After that was over I went down to the entrance of the library to do my customer exit surveys again, always a pleasure to get to meet the people using the library and get an idea of just what people use it for and how they're using it. I've done the survey so many times now I think I've worked out nearly every single possible use for every statistic the survey gathers. And it is quite interesting if I am right. Innocuous things like post-codes and what social media someone uses can tell us which social media platform to concentrate on for promotions and announcements and a lot of demographic information about the people coming in(plus we collect age and gender which narrows it down as well). I've had a lot of time to think about this stuff and it really does amaze me the ways I can think of to use the information and I'd love to know what other uses there are for it which I haven't thought of yet.
While I was doing the survey this lovely girl from America/France filled one out and told me about something called Permaculture which she was kind of studying by traveling around the world to observe it and other things. It ended up taking her almost twenty minutes to fill out the survey because we got talking about scarcity and the impact that having to impose scarcity on a society would likely have(I argued that if you want a permaculture you'd need to ration certain things because it isn't sustainable otherwise, she argued that this already happens and price is used to ration things out, which I disagreed with because someone who saves up or is stupidly rich can buy a lot of whatever and throw the system out of alignment, rationing would prevent anyone from getting stuff not just the majority, I'm sure there is a book idea in there somewhere).
After that was done I took a bus home, slept on the bus which is always fun, and then made dinner(Tacos! AGAIN!) for my dad and I and then drove to soccer training where we kicked the ball around for about an hour or so before packing it in and going back home. I did manage to tear my pants open while going for a ball and ended up having to play the entire game with half my pants hanging open. Which wasn't so bad but was followed by having to stop and buy petrol on the way home in a BP that I think I should never visit again.
Once I got home I mostly passed out asleep in my chair before getting up the energy at around 2am to write this. Tomorrow I have more volunteer work to do and then a post-exam get-together at Archives for all the people still at University. Archives is an interesting bar, they have a lot of varieties of beer there and the wallpaper is made from old comic books.
YouTube Clip of the Day.
Really looking forwards to this game, there are tombs, there is raiding and there is a girl who goes there to raid these tombs.