Social Work and Libraries: The Value of Organizational Scholarship In an Emerging Interdisciplinary Field

Public libraries have long served as essential civic institutions—spaces of access and learning that contribute to community health, resilience, and democratic life. In under-resourced communities, they provide consistent access to knowledge, technology, and social infrastructure (Lloyd, 2020). At the same time, libraries are under increasing strain as staff respond to overdoses, mental health crises, interpersonal conflict, and incidents of violence, while also addressing unmet needs related to housing instability and poverty. These conditions shape the day-to-day realities of staff and patrons (Multnomah County Auditor, 2024; Travers & Ridgen, 2023). Often without clinical training or sufficient institutional support, staff navigate these challenges, contributing to burnout and turnover (Urban Library Trauma Study, 2022). Public safety in libraries is bound up with these broader questions of access, care, and institutional responsibility. Yet policing remains a normalized response, even as care-based approaches gain traction among advocates (Balzer, 2020; Fry & Austin, 2021).

Libraries are developing responses including integrating social workers, adopting trauma-informed approaches, and forming collaborations with community partners. These efforts reflect interdisciplinary engagement but also variation across settings, raising questions about how approaches are conceptualized, enacted, and sustained. While emerging research documents these conditions and responses, organizational scholarship remains underutilized in how programs, policies, and interventions are designed. This gap limits understanding of how institutional policies, governance structures, professional roles, and resource constraints shape how libraries respond to community needs, including the implementation and outcomes of public safety interventions. Organizational theory offers tools to analyze these dynamics and identify pathways to address challenges.

This roundtable is designed as a praxis space. Five scholars working at the intersection of social work, libraries, and public safety will briefly present projects, focusing on barriers identified in their studies, including tensions related to policy, resource allocation, role clarity, and institutional responses to complex staff and patron needs. These reflections will surface how organizational conditions shape practice. An organizational scholar with expertise in critical organizational theory and carceral logics will respond, using this lens to deepen analysis by situating challenges within broader institutional processes and power dynamics. Synthesizing insights, this response will clarify conditions, reveal constraints, and identify pathways for action. The organizational scholar will highlight how these insights can inform interdisciplinary collaboration and expand possibilities for social work practice in libraries, including identifying levers for change and advancing life affirming approaches to safety while strengthening libraries as democratic institutions.

Participants will engage in structured dialogue to analyze these dynamics and consider implications for research, practice, and policy. In alignment with the 2027 SSWR theme, this roundtable emphasizes how social work research can move beyond description to support institutional change in service of equitable access and democratic public life. Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how organizational scholarship can inform their work, expanded approaches to mezzo-level analysis, and strategies for integrating organizational theory into research and practice in library social work and social work more broadly.