Page 138 - DLIS101_LIBRARY_AND_INFORMATION_SOCIETY

Unit 12: Library and Information Professionals

• Membership to Professional Association Notes
• Status and Image
• Gender Issues
• Lack of Licensed Librarian
• Property accountability
• Exodus of Librarians.

Self Assessment

Multiple Choice Questions:
3. Code of Ethics is an issue related to:
(a) Librarianship as a profession (b) Ethics of Librarianship
(c) Both (a) and (b) (d) None of these.
4. A calling requiring specialize knowledge and often long and intensive academic preparation
is called:
(a) Profession (b) Responsibility
(c) Leadership (d) None of these.

12.3 Ethics of Librarianship

Libraries, Intellectual Freedom, and Censorship in the Age of Technology

Libraries are the repositories for humanity’s knowledge; they are our past, our present, and our future.
The information available within the confines of a library must be accessible to all people, regardless
of wealth or status. Today, libraries are much more than storehouses for books and include many
other forms of electronic data. Retrieval requires specialized knowledge, and database searches that
can be quite costly. Who will pay for them is an extremely important question. With the rise of modern
technology, the logistics of the workplace changed forever, new rules were needed to govern behaviour,
and to develop procedures for librarians on the front lines of the Information Age. As Hans Jonas
states in The Imperative of Responsibility, “modern technology has introduced actions of such novel
scale, objects, and consequences, that the framework of former ethics can no longer contain them”
(Jonas 1984,34). This essay will Endeavour to give an overview of the most profound ethical dilemmas
facing libraries and librarians, and try to ascertain if Lee Finks’ concerns are still valid today. In
preface, it will be stated that the issue of confidentiality is so important and fundamental in any
discussion of ethics, and its promotion, maintenance, and preservation the custodial duty of every
library employee, that it will be considered an underlying and presumed practice.

Ethics and Technology

In today’s world, the ethical dilemmas faced by librarians and information professionals are
numerous. There is a growing interest in the topic of workplace ethics because the evolution of
modern technology has changed the manner in which humans interact with each other and their
environment (Jonas 1984,17). In The Recovery of Ethics in Librarianship, Richard Severson states that:
Technological innovation, for example, is enabling us to create “brave new worlds”... But automated
environments are unfamiliar worlds. Our old intuitive habits of evaluation, which are adequate for
determining what is best in traditional worlds, are inadequate in new and different settings.
It is imperative that ethics are considered in libraries, since it is often only librarians who have the
skills needed to access information from these new databases. Jane D. Schweinsburg stresses that it

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