Using volunteers in Ontario hospital libraries: views of library managers.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Volunteers have been a resource for all types of libraries for many years. Little research has been done to describe the attitudes librarians have toward library volunteers. More specifically, the attitudes of hospital librarians toward volunteers have never been studied. OBJECTIVE: The objective was to explore and describe the extent of volunteer use and to determine library managers' attitudes toward volunteers. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: An anonymous, self-report 38-item questionnaire was mailed to the target population of 89 hospital library managers in Ontario. Seventy-nine useable questionnaires were analyzed from an adjusted sample of 86 eligible respondents, resulting in a response rate of 92%. SPSS 11.5 was used to analyze the data. FINDINGS: The data revealed the attitudes of managers using volunteers did not differ significantly from the attitudes of managers not using volunteers. The findings showed that a majority of managers did not believe their libraries were adequately staffed with paid employees. Sufficient evidence was found of an association between a manager's belief in the adequacy of staffing in the library and the use of volunteers in the library (chi2(1, N=76)=4.11, P=0.043). Specifically, volunteers were more likely to be used by managers who did not believe their libraries were adequately staffed. The presence of a union in the library and the use of volunteers were also associated (chi2(1, N=77)=4.77, P=0.029). When unions were present in the library, volunteers were less likely to be used. IMPLICATIONS: This research has implications for hospital library managers in the management of volunteers. Volunteers should not be viewed as a quick fix or as a long-term solution for a library's understaffing problem.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".