According to the Association of Public Libraries (VOB), more than 22,600 volunteers were working in libraries by 2021, tripling from 2011. One in three Dutch library organizations use more than 150 hours of volunteering per week. Without this commitment, many branches would have long since had to close their doors. Yet several caveats must be made in this regard.

Next year I will be working as a volunteer in my own public library for twenty years. At the time, I was looking for a way to get to know people after I had just moved. Although it later turned out that getting a dog was a much more effective way to integrate, I never regretted my choice. I was able to browse around among the books and got to know many neighbors in the meantime, while also feeling I was doing something good for society.

Great then was my surprise when I found out that in some countries it is unusual – or even forbidden – to use volunteers in the library. In the eyes of some foreign unions, volunteers are taking jobs from paid workers and eroding the profession. I hadn't looked at it that way before: was I contributing to the demise of the library rather than its preservation?!

Over a year ago, the VOB and Probiblio organized a volunteer conference on the use of volunteers in the library. Unfortunately, I was not present, but the report available online suggests that mostly the positive aspects of volunteering were discussed. Volunteers contribute to the expansion of services because they take (clean-up) work off the hands of permanent staff or contribute with their own specific knowledge. They are the feelers of the neighborhood and thus contribute to the library’s connection with the local environment. They also support the development of communities, for example as hosts of a social activity, but are themselves an important target group. Volunteers help the library and vice versa: volunteering provides work experience, self-confidence, and – as for me – social contacts. It is a thin line between volunteers and the community.

 However, we should not simply romanticize the role of the volunteer. Isn’t the increasing use of volunteers a cost-saving tactic in disguise? Are we going to consider it normal that an essential service can be performed by anyone? Isn’t important knowledge being lost or are conflicts arising? The Cubiss Longread ‘Volunteer and professional together in the spotlight’ uses fictional characters to illustrate well the annoyances that can arise when a volunteer mishandles something in the eyes of the permanent staff. There can be miscommunication, mistrust, differing expectations, and feelings of job insecurity.

Finally, doesn't this make the library lean too much on senior volunteers who are available now due to an aging population, but may not be in a few years? Twenty years later, I am still the youngest volunteer on our team and there are almost no young additions.

It seems easy to work pleasantly with volunteers in a small, relatively homogeneous library like mine, where tensions and budget cuts are relatively limited. Within the same library organization, however, some branches prefer to hire work-study students. As a social geographer, this raises all sorts of questions for me: how, where and when does volunteering work, and how, where, and when does it not?