Abstract:
Volunteers in museums play an important role in supporting paid museum staff and
augmenting museum resources. If they are organized well they can help to realise
organizational goals and contribute to the overall success of the institutions in which
they participate. However the academic literature is broad in its recommendations
for how volunteers should be organized. This paper contributes to the discussion by
reporting on a study that examined the way in which three large museums in New
South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory in Australia organized their
volunteers. Methods used for data collection included semi-structured interviews
with volunteer coordinators from each institution and a self-administered
questionnaire which was mailed to the total population of volunteers at the three
institutions (641 at the time of data collection). The study found that each program
employed a bureaucratic approach, was successful and well structured. However,
the respective volunteer coordinators do not feel that volunteers are fully integrated
into the institutions and paid coordinators are insecure over their management
methods. These issues are discussed and recommendations are made for ways in
which volunteers can be better organized.
