Ethics and Librarianship

This work is an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of the subject. It promotes the view that as information managers, librarians must join with other professionals to renew a commitment to and interest in ethics. The book deals with such topics as ethics in general, the control of ideas, building collections, acquisitions and cataloging, access services, the reference function, special libraries, research and publication, and intellectual property and copyright. A chapter discusses why ethics matters.

Over the last few decades, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of papers and journal articles dealing with various ethical issues in librarianship, but only a few books. Information workers find themselves rendering new services and providing new kinds of information without much recourse to universally accepted ethical standards.

This work is an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of the subject. It promotes the view that as information managers, librarians must join with other professionals to renew a commitment to and interest in ethics. The book deals with such topics as ethics in general, the control of ideas, building collections, acquisitions and cataloging, access services, the reference function, special libraries, research and publication, and intellectual property and copyright. A chapter discusses why ethics matters.

Library Journal

This attempt at "an updated and comprehensive overview of the ethics of librarianship" finds much of common library practice unethical. After reading it, one wonders if it is possible to be an ethical librarian by Hauptman's standard. At the outset, we learn that "information workers" are apt to "breach confidentiality...violate copyright...steal." We read of "early days of American librarianship" that never really existed, when the practice was "ethically unambiguous." The author's judgmentally dim view of librarians, and of most other people, fills the rest of the book: he attacks the American Library Association's (ALA) position against labeling of library materials and asserts that paying high prices for library materials is somehow unethical (and worthy of boycott) and that it is unethical to do minimal cataloging or allow "untutored" copy catalogers to create original entries. Hauptman also condemns as unethical the ALA's position that age should not be a barrier to access to information. He even states that locating legal and health advice, viewing pornography, or gambling via public Internet terminals is unethical. The editor of the Journal of Information Ethics is particularly harsh on editors, claiming their principles collapse, because in addition to being slow and rude they "steal ideas." Similarly simplistic statements are offered in the chapter on Intellectual Property and Copyright. In the concluding chapter, Hauptman offers a final paragraph in which he weakly rationalizes his harsh, often unsubstantiated, judgments. "A study of ethical procedures and challenges...," he asks us to believe, "entails a concentration on negativities." Unfortunately, this rationalization is too little, too late. This book provokes, angers, and demands rebuttal. But if you don't need the tsuris, forget it.-John Berry, "Library Journal"