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Statement of Competency A

In which I discuss the ethics, values and foundational principles of library and information professionals and their role in the promotion of intellectual freedom.

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Just books, any books, not because he had opinions, not because
he had beliefs, there with his life forfeit, but because he was a librarian.
A person who looked after books. The one responsible.
(LeGuin 2002, p. 23)

Humans have the unique ability to accumulate information from their past experiences and then extrapolate the implications to use as tools to better control circumstances. The experiences of generations, formulated as knowledge, have the extraordinary quality that they are indestructible, as long as they are passed along. In his preface to the Book VI of the Ten Books on Architecture, Vitruvius (1914) relates the story of one Aristippus who upon shipwreck on Rhodes went on to use his knowledge and education to provide for himself in spite of desperate circumstances. After that experience, he sent the message to his countryman that the best thing that they ever can do for their children was to provide them “with property and resources of a kind that could swim with them even out of a shipwreck.” (p. 167)

As I am showing in the EVIDENCE 1 to this competency, which is a chronology of the crucial points of history of (public) libraries, the history of libraries and archives closely follows the development of awareness that free access to information ultimately benefits the whole society. It is the concept that took a long time to come to fruition, but eventually became almost universal. Limitations, which still exist in some countries, are more due to the lack of the financial resources, than opposition to the concept itself.

Collecting and preserving books are only the two most popular concepts associated with the image of a librarian, but the organization and cataloging of information is as important. Even priests in charge of the Library of Ashurbanipal (700s BCE) in the Assyrian city of Nineveh, realized that without the organization and ability to retrieve it, information was pretty much useless. And the need for professional organization of information is the reason why the Internet was not the death bell for the librarianship. The mass of information that requires sorting out just got bigger. The increased number of available media formats makes things even more confusing and difficult to find. At the same time, having the right information becomes increasingly important for professional and scholarly success as well as everyday life.

However, their peculiar position over the information flow does not mean that librarians and other information professionals should “influence or control the selection, organization, preservation, and dissemination of information” (American Library Association, 2008) by evaluating the “worthiness” of the information in their charge.

The librarians and information professional should refrain not only because of their sense of goodness or professional duty; but, as I show in my EVIDENCE 3 to this competency, because there is no objective or uniform way to measure the worthiness of information or knowledge. The value of particular information in the wider fabric of human knowledge is not always immediate and apparent. As James Burke (1978) shows in his books and TV series Connections, human knowledge is an intricate web where the “wrong” information could lead to true discoveries. The experiments of Luigi Galvani and conclusions about the “animal electricity” were wrong, but nevertheless were important stepping stones for the science of electricity.

Following Peter Drucker's (1994) article about social changes, knowledge would become the next source of power, and the control of that source would be a very important position. One can easily fall into the trap of desiring to "do good" and with all good intentions coming out of "knowing what is the right thing" actually become a controller and dispenser of the "truth." The ALA (2008) Code of Ethics ask Librarians "not to advance private interests," to uphold professional standards and to respect people's privacy.

The Internet and new digital technology not only provided new ways to preserve and disseminate human knowledge, but, also, opened new opportunities to democratize the access to information. As more and more people have the opportunity to use library collections, the ethical issues related to use and abuse of information become an integral part of librarianship.

The position of librarians as providers of information also puts them in the position to have possibly sensitive information about their users – who they are, what they read, and as an extrapolation of that – what they may be thinking. At times when the society feels threatened, either militarily or culturally, the information professionals are under strong pressures to share this information with the government whenever requested, regardless of the justification. As I show in the EVIDENCE 2 to this competency, it is not always easy to make distinctions between rules of confidentiality required of librarians by the Code of Ethic as formulated by the American Library Association and plain old civic duty.

The dilemma of the librarian, as presented in the scenario, is that revealing of the information she has on her patron, a 16 year-old girl, and helping her mother to extricate her daughter from a possibly dangerous relationship would violate the Code of Ethics of the American Library Association or Library Bill of Rights. The essay argues that as the mother did not ask for any personal information, reading or borrowing practices of her daughter in the library, and as the relationship and internet encounter did not happen on the library grounds or with the use of library computers, by helping the distraught mother the librarian will not violate library ethical codes. The scenario issues are all related to the civic responsibility of one human towards another, and probably the best help the librarian can do is to do what librarians do the best -- provide the mother with the information what local or state agencies deal with this kind of situation.

References:

American Library Association [ALA]. (2008). Code of Ethics of the American Library Association. ALA web site. Retrieved April 2, 2008, from http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/statementspols/codeofethics/codeethics.cfm

Burke, J. (1978). Connections. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Drucker, P. F. (1994). The age of social transformation. The Atlantic Monthly, 274(5), 53(18).

LeGuin, U.K. (2002). The Phoenix. In M. Cart (Ed.), In the stacks: Short stories about libraries and librarians (pp.18-23). Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press.

Vitruvius Pollio, Morgan, M. H., & Warren, H. L. (1914). Vitruvius, the ten books on architecture. Cambridge: Harvard university press. Retrieved April 1, 2008, from http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0073&query=head%3D%2354