Glasgow Women's Library's Collections Volunteering Programme

Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) is the only Accredited Museum in the UK dedicated to women’s lives, histories and achievements, with a lending library, archive collections and innovative programmes of public events & learning opportunities.

After achieving Recognised status for the entire GWL collection, the organisation experienced a substantial increase in visitors. This project aimed to meet this growing interest by recruiting and training new volunteers to meet and greet visitors, support access to the collection, and assist with cataloguing and preservation. A fixed term Collections Volunteer Coordinator post was created to oversee the recruitment and training of 15 new Collections Volunteers. The project prioritised the recruitment of volunteers who had experienced exclusion from museums due to educational, socio-economic and cultural barriers in the sector.

• Two volunteers have gone on to secure paid employment in museums, with both highlighting the skills and experience they gained through volunteering at GWL as a decisive factor.
• Volunteers provided 3200 visitors with a personalised welcome to GWL. Visitor feedback has been extremely positive, which is testament to the warm welcome, informative tours and extensive collections knowledge offered by the volunteers.
• Volunteers helped to list and catalogue thousands of items across 12 different collections.

• Volunteers reported wide ranging benefits as a result of volunteering with the collections. These included 70% gaining new knowledge and skills, 82% feeling the experience helped them to embrace new opportunities, and 74% reported improvements in their mental health as a result of taking part in the programme.
• GWL is regularly asked for information about volunteering programmes and widening access, and has been able to share good practice and learnings from this project with others from the museums sector and beyond.
• By recruiting volunteers from groups who are traditionally underrepresented in museum audiences, GWL has diversified its own audience as volunteers introduce their friends and families to the organisation.

• Motivated and enthusiastic volunteers can add huge value to an organisation. Volunteering has now been successfully embedded into all aspects all GWL’s work, from collections to day to day operations.
• One of the most positive and suprising learnings from this project was the wide range of benefits reported by volunteers as a result of working with the collections, in particular the reported improvements in mental health.

• Match the interests of your volunteers to the needs of your organisation. Creating a tailored role that fits each volunteer’s expectations and motivations is key to retaining volunteers and giving them a meaningful and beneficial experience.
• Allow for the almost inevitable fact that a small proportion of your volunteers will end of moving on as their circumstances change. During this project, 3-4 extra volunteers were recruited during each new intake to offset those who left.

If you would like any further information on this project, please contact Glasgow Women’s Library on info@womenslibrary.org.uk or 0141 550 2267.

This case study was originally published in March 2018.