Competency B: Organizational Settings
Describe and compare different organizational settings in which information professionals practice.
Introduction to Competency B
I understand this competency as knowing that the same professional skill is practiced very differently depending on who pays for the work, who governs it, and who it is for. Introductory texts in the field organize the profession by setting for this reason. Hirsh (2022) surveys school, academic, public, and special libraries and the wider range of organizations where information professionals now work. Each setting has its own source of funding, its own chain of authority, and its own definition of success. A public library answers to a city or county and measures itself by community use. An academic library answers to a university and measures itself by its contribution to teaching and research. A special library answers to a parent company or agency and has to show its value in that organization’s terms.
These differences are practical. They decide how fast a new service can be introduced, who has to approve a purchase, and what happens when a staff member leaves. I have found two frameworks helpful for comparing settings on these points. The first is the Technology Acceptance Model, in which Davis (1989) proposed that people adopt a technology when they perceive it as useful and as easy to use. The model applies to staff as much as to patrons. A tool that looks useful to a director may look like extra work to the person at the service desk. The second is normalisation process theory. Murray et al. (2010) describe four components that determine whether a new practice becomes routine in an organization: coherence, or whether people can make sense of it; cognitive participation, or whether they commit to it; collective action, or the work of making it happen; and reflexive monitoring, or the appraisal of its costs and benefits. Different organizational settings are strong and weak on different components. A volunteer organization may have high commitment and little capacity for collective action. A city department may have capacity and still struggle with coherence, because many staff must be convinced.
This competency matters to me because my working life does not sit inside one setting. I am a freelance contractor who evaluates AI systems for private companies. I am a volunteer coordinator for an international nonprofit research network. I have worked in a municipal public library, and I have completed a special study in a university research lab that builds resources for libraries in other states. Moving among these has taught me that advice which is correct in one setting can fail in another. A lending policy that works for a large metropolitan system can be impossible for a single small library with no secure storage and one staff member who is comfortable with the equipment.
The competency matters to the profession because information professionals increasingly work across organizational boundaries. Public libraries partner with museums. State library agencies lend equipment to local libraries. University labs design kits that are used in senior centers. A professional who understands only one setting will design for that setting and be surprised when the design does not travel. The three pieces of evidence below show me comparing settings directly, working inside one, and analyzing the constraints of another.
Evidence
My preparation for this competency came from INFO 204, Information Professions, which surveyed the settings of the field and required a group analysis of a real organization, and INFO 282, Seminar in Library Management, which examined how organizations plan, fund, and govern their work. My own employment and volunteer history supplied the rest of the comparison.
Evidence 1: Emerging Tech Road Show: Background and User Research (research report)
I wrote this 20-page report in September 2025 during my INFO 298 special study with the Library Technology Integration Lab, and it was presented to XR Libraries in partnership with SJSU. It reviews 21 technology lending programs in public libraries across 12 states in order to inform the design of a traveling kit of emerging technologies.
The report demonstrates this competency because its core analysis is a comparison of organizational settings. I grouped the programs by the type of institution that runs them: statewide government programs, major metropolitan systems, multi-city systems, and individual libraries. The differences were large. Georgia’s statewide program lends kits to libraries so that staff can train and test programs before buying equipment, and it does not lend to patrons directly. Houston Public Library runs four technology locations and a mobile unit. A single library such as Goodnow Library in Massachusetts offers a smaller collection with age restrictions and simple lending rules. I concluded that storage and maintenance capacity often determine how ambitious a program can be. The report closes with focus group questions that ask library staff who would manage the kits, where they would be stored, and how much financial responsibility the library could accept, which are all questions about organizational capacity. [Note for you: correct the reference list in this report before you link it.]
Evidence 2: The Emerging Library (presentation)
This is a 20-slide presentation on technology trends and their meaning for library services. [State the audience and date. It appears to have been prepared for Scottsdale Public Library staff after the 2025 ALA and iLRN conferences.] It covers automation, machine vision, artificial intelligence, and extended reality, and then turns to what a library would have to do to adopt them.
The presentation demonstrates the competency because it is written from inside one specific setting, a municipal public library. The challenges it names are the ones that setting produces: managing shared devices, paying for software licenses through city purchasing rules, and finding staff time for training. I reported how other libraries had handled the same constraints. I also used normalisation process theory to argue that a new technology has to make sense to all stakeholders and solve a problem before it will be accepted, and I stated that resistance from staff can be useful because it balances enthusiasm with realism. The presentation shows that I can translate what I saw at national conferences into terms that fit one organization’s rules.
Evidence 3: Connect Arizona: Digital Equity Program SWOT (group analysis)
This analysis was written in Fall 2024 for INFO 204 by a group of three, and I wrote the Weaknesses and Opportunities sections. Its subject is Connect Arizona, a digital equity program that gives Arizona residents free technology help by phone through Digital Navigators, who are library staff from around the state. The program is led by the state library agency and supported with federal funds.
The analysis demonstrates the competency because it examines a fourth kind of setting: a statewide program run through a government agency that serves residents directly. In the Weaknesses section I identified the constraints that this structure produces. The program depends on broadband companies that operate for profit and have little incentive to serve sparsely populated areas. It has to cover very large rural distances and tribal lands that make up a quarter of the state. Money that has been approved can be held up by regulatory and bureaucratic delay. Staff positions tied to specific grants bring job insecurity, make long-term planning difficult, and contribute to burnout and turnover. In the Opportunities section I recommended transparent performance indicators that are available to every stakeholder, including the public, and a place in decision making for the people the program is meant to serve.
Set beside the other two pieces, the comparison is clear. The city library has staff, buildings, and purchasing rules, and its limit is time. The statewide program has reach and professional staff, and its limits are funding that depends on government decisions and partners it does not control. My own volunteer organization, the Immersive Learning Research Network, is different again: it has no paid staff at all, so its limit is the capacity of volunteers to sustain work. [Before linking: remove teammates’ names, and leave the peer review section of your reflection out of the portfolio.]
Conclusion
I expect to keep working across settings, and I will apply this competency each time I design something that has to move from one kind of organization to another. Before I recommend a service I will ask who governs the organization, who pays, and who will maintain the service after I leave. To stay current I will follow the Public Library Association and Library Journal for the public library sector, the Association for Information Science and Technology for research and special settings, and WebJunction for the practical concerns of small libraries. [Add iLRN or another network you rely on.]
References
Davis, F. D. (1989). Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. MIS Quarterly, 13(3), 319–340. https://doi.org/10.2307/249008
Hirsh, S. (Ed.). (2022). Information services today: An introduction (3rd ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. Murray, E., Treweek, S., Pope, C., MacFarlane, A., Ballini, L., Dowrick, C., Finch, T., Kennedy, A., Mair, F., O’Donnell, C., Ong, B. N., Rapley, T., Rogers, A., & May, C. (2010).