Thanks for your response. Please don't get me
wrong. I wasn't suggesting that librarians as a
group tend toward non-ethical, or even unethical,
behavior :-).
But seriously. I don't mean at all to imply that
libraries are anything but a boon to society, or that
librarians haven't been doing a good job at a lot of
things, and don't have a tradition of striving in
many ( though certainly not all ) ways and under
many ( though certainly not all ) circumstances to
run their operations and to make their decisions in
an altruistic and quasi-disinterested way. And of
taking stances against certain more blatant forms
of censorship. Those are the kind of accomplish-
ments for which you now feel yourself called upon
to sing their praise, if I understand you correctly.
And not unjustly. Those are worthy accomplish-
ments, nonetheless straightforward and simple
( but, I readily add, not always easy or painless )
things to do -- but have little to do with any
reasonable basis for holding that this particular
occupational group can by its nature, and perhaps
even more so than any other group one might
name, lay claim to a special expertise in the area
of ethics.
And your first reaction is, now, to set up a false
distinction ( if not indeed also a straw man ) : a
distinction between, on the one hand, ethics as
something addressed by philosophy ; and, on the
other hand, "real-life situations".
That distinction doesn't exist. And I feel that I
would be remiss if I left uncontradicted here the
proposal that it does exist. Ethics "in philosophical
terms" ( to use your words ) *is* by definition
concerned with, revolves around, real-life situations.
That's its business, that's its raison d'être. And how
one views those situations, and reacts to them --
and therefore ethics itself -- can not but bring with
it, as we've learned over the course of the last
several thousand years, all kinds of essential, critical
nuances. Nuances with which very many librarians
don't take ( or really need to take ? ) the care to
trouble themselves -- if indeed they are even aware
of them. Ethics ( like real life ) is really not that
simple a matter.
It's clear to me in any event that your heart is in
the right place. I admire your sense of social and
cultural responsibility, what I take to be your values
and how effectively you express them, and I agree
with a whole lot of what you bring forward in your
valuable contributions. Libraries and those who
work in them do a whole lot of good. But where is
it going to get anybody to engage in such self-
satisfied, self-serving, self-aggrandizing, and to my
mind grotesque, fantasies as those which have
recently surfaced again in our list traffic -- that
they are "organizers of information" ( or even of
knowledge ! ), or, now, that they are "real-life"
ethics experts ? Engaging ( especially publicly ) in
this kind of discourse seems to me something that
does their cause, and the cause of libraries, more
harm than good, when you get right down to it.
And that's regrettable. And that was my real point.
- Laval Hunsucker
Breukelen, Nederland
----- Original Message ----
From: Weinheimer Jim <j.weinheimer_at_AUR.EDU>
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Sent: Tue, May 11, 2010 4:33:57 PM
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Digital Information Seekers: How Academic Libraries Can Support the Use of Digital Resources; Briefing Paper
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 - 18:00:58 EDT