Competency O

Understand global perspectives on effective information practices that are supportive of cultural, economic, educational, or social well-being.

Section 1: Introduction

An information practice can only be evaluated in relation to the needs, resources, and knowledge systems of the people it is meant to serve. This means information professionals cannot assume that whatever counts as “best practice” in one context, often a well-resourced, Western institution, will automatically serve communities elsewhere, or even communities closer to home who operate from different cultural or economic starting points. A metadata standard, a classification system, or a digital platform designed around the assumptions of one country’s language, infrastructure, legal system, or cultural norms may function poorly, or even cause harm, when applied elsewhere without adaptation. I understand Competency O to mean that information professionals must recognize and respond to the cultural, economic, educational, and social contexts that shape information practices around the world, using that understanding to create information services and systems that support community well-being rather than imposing a single model of effective practice.

Chatman’s (1999) theories of information behavior offer a useful starting point for understanding how social and cultural contexts shape people’s relationships with information. Although Chatman developed her theory of “Life in the Round” through research with women in a U.S. prison, later researchers have applied the theory in very different cultural contexts. Zhu and Du’s (2020) study of ethnic minorities with small populations in China, for example, found that traditions, customs, lifestyles, and ethnic identity shaped participants’ information-seeking behavior, and that Chatman’s theory could help explain their reluctance to cross the information boundaries of their communities. The authors argued that organizations serving these minority groups must understand their information-seeking behaviors in order to design information systems and services that are responsive to their needs while supporting the preservation of their language and culture. Goetzfridt (2013) raises a similar concern from a different angle, describing how the American concept of the library and its associated information classification systems were imported into Micronesia in ways that displaced communal systems for classifying knowledge and privileged positivistic Western standards of information organization. He argues that treating indigenous epistemology as an anomaly within these imported structures undermines the library’s claims to neutrality and equity.

This question of whose practices are treated as normative arises beyond libraries and other traditional information institutions. Eleftheriotis and Iordanova (2006) illustrate this dynamic in their study of film culture, arguing that “Euro-American film theory” has defined cinephilia around solitary engagement with canonical texts, a definition that treats the more collective, populist forms of film enthusiasm found in South Asian film culture as outside the norm rather than as a legitimate variation of it. Digital platforms can further complicate these dynamics by expanding access to knowledge production. Hua (2021), for example, describes how online platforms for Chinese film criticism have begun to break down the barriers that once separated professional critics from ordinary film lovers. In any information system I help build or maintain, I must therefore reflect on whose way of engaging with information is being treated as the default, and whose is being treated as marginal.

Understanding global differences in information practices is only part of this competency; information professionals must also consider how their work can actively support the well-being of the communities they serve. Hirsh’s (2022) discussion of the profession’s changing landscape connects this directly to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), describing how the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) has documented the many ways libraries and information organizations contribute to economic, educational, and social well-being worldwide, from supporting literacy and informed decision-making to safeguarding cultural heritage and connecting people to a global network of expertise. Libraries around the world can learn from each other’s approaches to the SDGs, even when those approaches must be adapted to fit different local circumstances. A global perspective therefore does not mean rejecting practices developed in any particular region, but recognizing that useful practices can be shared across contexts without assuming they will have the same meaning or effectiveness everywhere.

I encountered this perspective during my volunteer work with the Library Technology Integration Lab at San Jose State University. Although I did not work directly on its Sustainable Development Goals Library project, I explored its immersive virtual-reality resource center, which highlights library initiatives from around the world that support the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Seeing how libraries in different contexts contribute to global education, access, and civic engagement reinforced for me the value of learning from information practices beyond my own cultural context.

This competency matters to me both because my professional interests center on film archives and cinema culture, fields that are inherently international and unevenly resourced across countries, and because I believe the credibility of information professionals depends on not exporting one region’s assumptions about information work as though they were universal. I expect to draw on this competency in nearly every aspect of my future career, whether I am selecting materials, designing metadata, or considering who can realistically access the information resources I create.

References

Section 2: Evidence

My understanding of this competency comes from coursework that has repeatedly put me in a position to compare information practices across national and cultural contexts, whether by researching institutions abroad, engaging with international scholarship, working with a platform whose users and legal obligations span multiple countries, comparing how different national governments regulate the same emerging technology, or applying and evaluating international cataloging and accessibility standards directly in my own work.

My first piece of evidence is a blog post I wrote for INFO 284 on the international dimensions of cinephilia and film access. In it, I traced how histories of cinephilia have often centered on France, and used Eleftheriotis and Iordanova’s (2006) and Hua’s (2021) research on Indian and Chinese film culture, respectively, to show that this narrative excludes populist and platform-based forms of cinephilia that differ from the traditions of Euro-American film theory developed by credentialed scholars. I also examined how access to restored global cinema remains stratified by place: many films restored by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project are distributed through the Criterion Channel with English-only hardcoded subtitles. This streaming service is not available outside the US and Canada, so restored versions of a country’s own films may often be more accessible to North American audiences than to the audiences and film cultures from which they originated. The issue is therefore not only unequal access to information, but unequal access to cultural heritage and participation in one’s own film culture. I connected this problem to concrete, low-resource strategies libraries can use to improve global access to cinema. Examples include organizing cross-cultural film series through the American Library Association’s sister library program, or forming partnerships like the one between the Arab American National Museum and Cinema Lamont to curate programming for local diasporic audiences. This piece demonstrates my ability to recognize when a globally circulating information practice, in this case, film restoration and distribution, actually reproduces unequal access along geographic lines, and to identify realistic ways smaller institutions can work against that pattern.

My second piece of evidence is a comparative review of three moving image archives I wrote for INFO 284: Anthology Film Archives in New York, the Eye Filmmuseum in the Netherlands, and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Researching these institutions side by side made clear how differently national context shapes archival practice. Eye Filmmuseum’s collection policy explicitly commits to prioritizing underrepresented areas of its holdings to foster a more inclusive global film history. Its extensive public education programming, which brings more than 11,000 students into contact with its collection annually, is enabled in part by the substantial government subsidies characteristic of Dutch cultural funding. UCLA, by contrast, operates through a mix of university support and private philanthropy. It has built its collecting priorities around illuminating the social justice history of Los Angeles and Southern California specifically, a regional rather than global orientation, while still preserving international material. Meanwhile, New York’s Anthology Film Archives, founded by a collective of mostly American filmmakers, defined its canon of Essential Cinema around American independent and avant-garde cinema and selected European, Soviet, and Japanese films as precursors to that tradition, rather than attempting fully global representation. Analyzing these three models side-by-side made me realize that effective archival practice cannot be judged by universal metrics; it depends entirely on the specific funding sources, cultural mandate, and constituency of an archive. What works for a nationally subsidized European museum may not fit the needs of a regional university archive or a donor-funded, specialized collection.

My third piece of evidence is a Flickr metadata assignment from INFO 282, in which I built a collection from photographs I took in Portugal and evaluated the platform’s metadata capabilities. Working with this platform required navigating international information practices: I chose to tag locations using both Portuguese and English place names, since I could not assume which language a user searching for photos of these places would use. In choosing a Creative Commons license for my photos, I also had to determine how to handle the rights of the strangers who incidentally appeared in some of my photographs, deciding whether the General Data Protection Regulation’s carve-out for personal data processed for artistic expression would apply. Understanding GDPR is useful for an information professional beyond the specific case of photographs taken abroad, since information professionals frequently encounter data, images, or records subject to international legal frameworks. This evidence demonstrates that global perspective is not only relevant to large international institutions; even a small, personal information project can require attention to the legal and linguistic context of the place where materials were created.

My fourth piece of evidence is a search exercise from INFO 244, in which I used Dialog to locate a particular trade journal article summarizing global efforts to regulate artificial intelligence. The exercise required me to research and compare regulatory approaches across multiple jurisdictions: the European Union’s comprehensive AI Act; the United Kingdom’s stated intent to develop a regulatory framework; and the United States’ fragmented approach, in which federal guidance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology coexists with a patchwork of individual state laws, with no single comprehensive federal framework. Because these regulatory differences affect how organizations collect data, deploy automated systems, and protect individuals from potential harms, understanding them is also part of understanding how information practices can support social well-being in different jurisdictions.

Constructing an effective search for this material also taught me something about the practical difficulties of researching across multiple geographies. My initial search terms “global” and “world” did not meaningfully narrow my results; I only found relevant material once I began using the database’s location field to target specific jurisdictions directly. This showed me that finding internationally comparative information requires deliberately adapting a search strategy to the database’s subject and location indexing rather than assuming that broad terms like “global” are sufficient. The exercise therefore demonstrated both the substantive and practical dimensions of this competency: information governance differs across national contexts, and understanding those differences requires information professionals to adapt how they search for and evaluate cross-jurisdictional information.

My fifth piece of evidence is a metadata and digital asset management project from INFO 282, in which I created descriptive, technical, and rights metadata for a collection of short film clips and evaluated how the collection might be organized within a digital asset management system. In doing so, I applied an international standard, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which I used to evaluate the collection’s accessibility for visually impaired and deaf or hard-of-hearing users. Applying WCAG’s criteria helped me discover accessibility issues, like the absence of caption files or audio descriptions, that I would not have identified by simply reviewing the collection on its own terms. This made the connection between technical information practice and social well-being concrete for me: metadata and design decisions can determine whether people with disabilities can meaningfully access cultural resources. I also applied the Library of Congress’s Genre/Form Terms as a controlled vocabulary for the genre field, and drew on the Library of Congress’s Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (TGM) in assigning keywords, since it contains many terms relevant to this kind of visual material. I consulted the International Federation of Film Archives’ (FIAF) Glossary of Filmographic Terms but found it less useful for this particular task because it focuses primarily on filmographic rather than subject-based description. Because neither TGM nor FIAF’s glossary fully covered the proper names and audiovisual-specific terms this collection needed, I concluded that a locally defined controlled vocabulary would likely best serve this collection going forward. This evidence demonstrates two related but distinct skills this competency requires: applying international and national standards directly, as with WCAG, the Genre/Form terms, and TGM, and critically evaluating whether an existing standard actually fits a given context well enough to rely on.

Section 3: Conclusion

Together, these five pieces of evidence have taught me that effective information practice requires both attention to context and a willingness to learn across contexts. An information practice that seems neutral or standard may reflect particular national, cultural, or economic assumptions, and these assumptions can have concrete consequences for well-being. My evidence also demonstrates that contextualizing information practice affects whether people can access cultural heritage, participate in cultural life, learn from information resources, and exercise meaningful control over their own information. In my future career, I intend to apply this competency by resisting the assumption that a well-resourced institution’s practices should simply be replicated elsewhere, while remaining open to learning from information professionals working in different contexts. This will affect decisions ranging from selecting materials and designing metadata to evaluating accessibility.

To continue developing this competency, I plan to follow the International Federation of Film Archives’ Journal of Film Preservation and its international training workshops, as well as IFLA’s Library Services to Multicultural Populations Section, which focuses specifically on adapting library services to linguistically and culturally diverse communities. These resources will help me continue learning how information professionals adapt preservation and library services to different cultural, linguistic, and economic contexts.