Laval Hunsucker wrote:
<snip>
> Librarians are the experts in this field.
Funny -- I've met thousands of librarians ( and am one myself ), but I've never met one who was an expert on ethics ( or metaphysics, or logic, or
aesthetics, etc. ), or could even expatiate coherently on any of those areas of philosophy. Why are they disguising themselves so effectively ?
</snip>
I have met some librarian-experts on this, but I am not talking in philosophical terms, but in real-life situations. In the U.S., librarians subscribe to a Code of Ethics, available at: http://staging.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oif/statementspols/codeofethics/codeethics.cfm Some people may laugh and snicker at this, but this code of ethics, if taken as seriously as it should be, provides a level of trust that people cannot find anywhere else in the information environment and is becoming increasingly critical today. Although people like to believe that they can "trust" Google results, such results can and are regularly manipulated by all kinds of groups who have learned how to make the google search result act in ways that help their cause, their politics, their business, their beliefs, or other ways they prefer. For instance, internet businesses *must* come up high in the rankings, otherwise no one will find their sites, and no one will buy their goods and their businesse!
s will die. They can and will do *anything* to raise their rankings, since practically everything is legal on the web. And they can do a lot, which is one thing that your information people can discuss. Some of these attempts are extremely clever.
In the U.S., librarians have had to deal with the Patriot Act, which some librarians consider turns them into spies since they can be forced to turn over circulation information to the government. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/06/librarians-desc/ Librarians have always had to deal with demands for censorship, but what about using a stop word list for censorship purposes, e.g. to block words related to "abortion"? http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/04/administrators/
Michael Moore's book, "Stupid White Men" was blocked for a long time until librarians spoke out. http://www.slis.indiana.edu/news/story.php?story_id=443 These examples can go on and on. There are librarians sent to jail in Cuba, China and lots of other places.
Here's a great story of a librarian who was sent to jail back in the early 1970s: http://lsa.uoregon.edu/newsletter05/0508news.html
What librarians do has important real-life consequences, and they need to keep this in mind. I feel that reliable, secure, and confidential access to information is an extremely serious affair for people in a democracy--it is not a joke at all--and will become even more serious and important in the future. These are some of the major concerns that people have concerning the destruction of the newspaper industry: without professional journalists, how can the public get hold of reliable information that is not just taken directly from public relations agencies?
Professional journalists certainly have their part to play, but librarians have just as important of a role to provide ethical access to materials in a non-biased and reliable way. None of this can be done perfectly of course, but it is librarians who have had the experience doing precisely this.
James Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
via Pietro Roselli, 4
00153 Rome, Italy
Received on Tue May 11 2010 - 10:34:39 EDT