Exploring the Academic Archives and Beyond: Research Can Be Your Friend

Do you have a fresh concept for building your volunteer program, and you wonder if anyone has ever tried it before? Or perhaps you need someone with formal skills in scientific methods to help you design a plan for implementation? When you need answers to both of these issues, you can turn to academic research and research practitioners. Exploration of research literature can result in ideas and evidence to support best practices in volunteer engagement, and results can be multiplied through collaborative partnerships with faculty and student scholars.

In this article, Janina M. Fuller presents a practical approach to mining scholarly literature and to finding colleagues in academia to create partnerships that will expand your research horizons even further. Seeking research-based articles that offer fresh insights into the everyday concerns of volunteer management professionals? Writing a grant proposal to fund a new programming initiative? Whatever your goal, this article will provide new access to the vast and largely untapped resource of scholarly literature, and to the people who create it.