The Study

　　It’s not only the willingness but also the following qualities that make a volunteer:

■  It’s “being a volunteer” rather than “doing a volunteer.”

■  Its’ the accomplishment of democracy rather than the accumulation of charity.

■  It’s the professional service rather than the random benefaction.

■  It’s to improve the public welfare rather to increase personal reputation.

■  It’s to unite the whole society.

■  The pride belongs to the society, and the credit belongs to others.

■  One can praise others’ excellence.

■  One can cherish and express his/her own specialty.

　　Base on the literature review, we can know that there are different motives for people to be a volunteer, such as being influenced by others, establishing a social connection, killing time, and making a self-improvement.

　　What the volunteers can acquire from their service include learning new stuff, increase knowledge, feeling happy, having positive self-evaluation, getting better communication skill, and so on.

　　Volunteers can be categorized by their service time and work content into six groups:

■ Lon-term-volunteers：Many non-government organizations need long-term volunteers’ stable and consistent help.  These volunteers usually have a strong sense of belonging and positive self-evaluation, and feel their life meaningful as well.

■ short-term volunteers：They are usually recruited by the organizations for specific activities.  Because their service time is limited, most of them do one kind of task only.

■ Family volunteers：According to an American research, 28% volunteers work voluntarily with their family.  They can hence gather together, share their experience and pass the social values.

■ Enterprise volunteers：Some enterprises encourage their employees to be volunteers that it can be part of the work training and also benefit the society.

■ Professional volunteers：More and more professionals such as accountants, doctors, lawyers and computer engineers provide their specialty to the voluntary work.

■ Interns：On the one hand, schools and communities can be benefited well through students’ intern service; one the other hand, the interns themselves can also learn a lot for their personality, working experience and the concern for the society through their service.

　　The library volunteers should be in the catalog of “short-term volunteers” according to their working time and occasion.