What Would You Do Tomorrow?

Ed.D. Dissertation, Plymouth State University, 2026

A mixed methods study exploring how library workers reason through intellectual freedom challenges and what organizational conditions shape whether they can act on what they know. The study treats scenarios not only as learning activities, but also as diagnostic tools for surfacing reasoning patterns, feasibility barriers, and training needs.

149

Survey Respondents

Interviews

Library Types

Methods (Survey + Interview)

Research Contribution

This study shows that preparedness for intellectual freedom work is not simply a matter of individual knowledge. Library workers often know the policy-aligned response, but their ability to act depends on role authority, administrative support, policy quality, and local working conditions. That finding shifts the training question from “What should staff know?” to “What conditions help staff carry out sound decisions in practice?”

Research Questions

RQ1: How do library workers make decisions and reason through realistic intellectual freedom challenge scenarios? What factors influence their choice?
RQ2: What do participants' responses suggest about the potential usefulness and focus of future scenario-based training?

Key Findings

1. Knowledge-Feasibility Gap

80-97% selected policy-aligned responses, but beneath that consensus lies a gap between knowing the right action and being able to carry it out.

2. Preparedness is Structural

Feeling prepared depends less on personal knowledge and more on organizational conditions like administrative support, clear policy, and defined roles.

3. Symbolic Capital Shapes Response

Workers with more professional standing invoked policy as authority; workers with less standing followed scripts and deferred to supervisors.

4. Policy as Tool and Point of Failure

Policy is the primary resource but fails across five dimensions: legitimacy, clarity, accessibility, gaps, and administrative bypass.

5. Scenarios as Reflective Triggers

Despite modest usefulness ratings, four interviewees took concrete professional action directly prompted by the study's scenarios.

6. Emotional Labor is Under-Resourced

Emotional toll, fear of backlash, and identity-targeted challenges are predictable but no participant reported training for these dimensions.

7. Setting Shapes Barriers, Not Logic

All library types share the same core action sequence but operate within distinct authority structures.

The library workforce largely knows what to do but faces uneven organizational conditions for doing it.

Implications for Practice

Training must address organizational conditions, not just individual knowledge
Libraries need policy ecosystems, not just policy documents
Scenarios should be used diagnostically to surface gaps before designing interventions
Professional development should prepare workers for emotional labor
Programs should build symbolic capital for paraprofessional and early-career staff

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