Adult Volunteer

We offer Adult Volunteer opportunities within the Collection Services Department at the Sonoma County Library Headquarters located near the Rohnert Park Cotati Regional Library,  generally 2-4 hours per week.

Mending Volunteer

This opportunity is for adults, aged 18 and over.

Intermediate to Advanced Book Repair and/or Archival Stabilization, Preservation, and Processing

We offer volunteer opportunities to support the Sonoma County Library Collections. Volunteer must have the skills and knowledge to perform some of these tasks:

  • Gluing/taping cuts and tears in a variety of paper stocks and book dust jackets
  • Tipping in loose pages and whole signatures
  • Reinforcing spines and hinges – replacing whole and half-hinges
  • Re-casing and consolidating text blocks – hardback and paperback books
  • Archival book repair, creating custom enclosures, housing, and processing rare and fragile historical material

The only requirements are:

  1. Be at least 18 years of age
  2. Commit to at least 2-4 hours per week
  3. Read and sign the Sonoma County Library's Discrimination, Harassment and Retaliation Prevention Policy

Digital Collections Volunteer

This opportunity is for adults, aged 18 and over.

We offer a volunteer opportunity to support the Sonoma County Digital Collections, as well as some aspects of the Library's Archival Collections, generally 2-4 hours per week. The volunteer will assist with a variety of tasks related to historical collections to be added to the Digital Collections website.

Duties may include:

  • Prepare and digitize photographs, postcards, documents and other historical materials
  • Perform basic image editing and enhancement
  • Assist with inventorying collections
  • Applying barcodes and labels to containers for materials
  • Duties vary depending on current projects

While prior experience is always helpful, interest and enthusiasm is more important. We train! 

Some of Our Current Projects...

  • Scanning several hundred volumes of "Abstracts of Title" produced from the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the Sonoma County Abstract Bureau. These books contain descriptions of chains of ownership for Sonoma County property parcels and include parcel map sketches. They provide a valuable window into the history of local land ownership from the early days of European settlement through the 1930s, as well as a source of local genealogical information. Volunteers will scan all pages with the Cataloging Department's overhead scanner and check results for quality. They will also use basic image editing software to enhance a select number of pages that will be processed with OCR and used for adding the volumes to the Library's catalog.
  • Improving storage conditions for the Library's extensive photographic print collection by arranging photographs into folders with labels.
  • Geotagging photographs from the Library's photo collection for the purpose of making them available on our photo map. The majority of photographs are tagged, but we have a large group of photographs for which the exact location has not yet been identified. For this project, the volunteer(s) will view the photographs on our Digital Collections site, locate the photo's setting with Google Maps, and record the coordinates into a spreadsheet that staff can use to make updates on the site
  • Reviewing and editing scanned images of early sheet music in order to create PDFs that will be loaded to the Library's Digital Collections site and to Internet Archive. 

Requirements for being an Adult Volunteer:

1.  Complete the application.

2.  Pass the background check.

3.  Read and sign the Sonoma County Library's Discrimination, Harassment and Retaliation Prevention Policy.

4.  Sign up for available shift(s).

5.  Wait until you are accepted for shift(s).