Understanding the Context of your GLAM Institution
Table of contents
When developing a policy, consider your institution type, structure, and decision-making context. This helps determine who needs to be involved in developing or approving a new policy and how you can govern those policies and procedures after you have established them. For example, private or non-profit institutions may have different obligations to a board of directors than public institutions do. Among libraries, significant differences exist between academic libraries, public libraries, and special libraries.
How are decisions made?
Two organizations of the same type may still have differing governance models, decision-making contexts, and structures. Some institutions may take a top-down approach to decision making, while others take a more collaborative approach. Understanding and acknowledging the organizational structure will help develop successful accessibility policies and procedures within the context of your institution.
A “one size fits all” approach will not work, even for institutions of the same type and structure, making best practices difficult to generalize. Given this, it is helpful to ask yourself the following questions:
- Is accessibility a distributed and shared responsibility, or the specified responsibility of certain employees?
- Is decision making top-down, committee-based, or something in between?
- Are projects managed and evaluated in a top-down manner, or in a more distributed way?
- Who has the authority to make or approve policy decisions and responsibilities? By extension, who must be involved in an accessibility policy’s creation if it’s to be enforceable?
- Who, if anyone, has the time, resources, and authority to monitor an accessibility policy’s success?
It is important to develop policies that work within your organizational structure. This can be done by creating and developing policies through a committee, sending a policy proposal to the administration, or bringing it to the right person or group with the power to develop or approve library policies. Seek buy-in from those responsible for completing accessibility work, as well as from those who will be accountable for its success.