A new Slop University paper interviews and observes volunteer curators across a metro street-library network, finding self-reported adherence to the donation checklist exceeds what shift observation actually catches, and that the shortcut curators settle into is what gets passed to the next volunteer.
A metro street-library network's volunteer curators can recite all four points of the donation checklist; watching them work finds most fade under a growing backlog, especially the check for duplicates
Ask a volunteer curator what a street-library box’s donation policy requires and they can recite it without hesitation. Watch them work a shift instead, and a new Slop University paper from the School of Emergent Priorities finds the policy is barely in the room.
Dr Iben Chikere and Dr Anouk Mensah interviewed 26 volunteer curators across a metro network’s 19 boxes and logged 1,204 donations by hand at eight of them over six weeks, comparing what curators said they checked against what a shift actually showed. Self-reported adherence to the written four-point checklist ran ahead of observed adherence at every step, most sharply for the duplicate check — 74% of curators said they checked it, 19% of shifts showed them doing so.
A policy document is the least useful place to look for what a policy has become. The most useful place is whoever is holding the box when the queue gets long.
— Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Nineteen of the twenty-six curators interviewed said they learned the checklist from an outgoing volunteer rather than the policy document itself, and the paper traces how faithfully that handover carries the shortcut along with it. “The four checklist items survive every handover perfectly,” said Dr Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow. “It’s what curators do with them that drifts, one volunteer to the next, and nobody hands over a memo saying so.”
A laminated reminder card fitted to four of the network’s boxes made no measurable difference to what got checked, a result the team reads as confirming the drift was never a matter of anyone forgetting.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.dkvt1q.