Ethics!

The first part of the Professional Knowledge and Skills Base deals with the subject of ethics. Although you do learn about this subject while on the job, I think it does help to read a text on library ethics so that you are aware of ethical issues. They can crop up in surprising areas.

One ethical issue is copyright. This one at least should be fairly obvious to most librarians. Although copyright law does not always seem fair, it is necessary to protect the rights of content creators. I must admit that I am not perfect in this area and I admit this with full knowledge that I can be sanctioned by CILIP for unethical conduct. But confession is good for the soul, or so they say...

The problem for me has been that although I know what is right, I also want to please my coworkers and the readers. If, for example, a reader asks for a journal that we do not have access to, one of my coworkers can access it because they know the account details of another library. I have known that this is wrong, but have not challenged the practice with much seriousness. Alas, being ethical is harder than it may seem.

Another ethical area is accessibility. This covers not only physical accessibility, but the access one has to all types of material. Material access comes up in collection development. Do you order a book that you don't believe in? This can be a problem for religious librarians or librarians under pressure from a religious populous.

I have run into this issue in weeding--once as a school librarian and once in the medical library. In the school library I was not happy with a book in the parenting section that was written by a pastor who wanted to "instruct" parents on how to prevent their boys from becoming gay. This often involved capital punishment and not allowing them to develop what some may consider feminine values or habits. I felt bad about weeding it because I am fiercely against censorship. However, I eventually decided that it simply had no place in our particular collection because of the school's policy against violence and discrimination.

The other book was one on homeopathy in the health library. It was old and needed replacing. I suggested that we simply keep it in the collection and not waste money on replacing it. It's a difficult issue since medical staff should have access to all medical-type books for research purposes, but at the same time, most medical professionals would agree that homeopathy is not based on sound medical science and the medical library is dedicated to protecting patients via evidence-based care.

Physically, the medical library is not hugely accessible. I was surprised to learn recently that they had no screen reading software which turned out to be an issue for some of the less-sighted clerical staff. In my recent trip to the Christ Church library, it was nice to see that they had built the library with physical accessibility in mind. The library is also environmentally sustainable.

One other very important ethical issue in librarianship is privacy. This is an especially big issue in the age of the internet where nearly all private information is accessible if you know how to hack someone's password. Of course, you don't even need to go that far. When I was a volunteer at a public library, people came in for help with filling out forms. No one else would help them so I didn't want to turn anyone away, but at the same time, they were sharing very private and potentially damaging information with a complete stranger.

In the US, Google Drive and Amazon have come under scrutiny for keeping records on what ebooks readers have checked out. They do this to try and sell books to a possible consumer, which has its own ethical issues. But even more disturbing, perhaps, is how this info could and has been used against people in the past. What we read is private. For my part, I won't give out this information where just anyone in the library can hear it, instead opting to let a reader know how many books they have checked out rather than saying the titles out loud.