July 28, 2008
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Sixteen Chapter members attended the Information Ethics Town Hall meeting on Monday, July 28. Before introducing the evening's speaker, Wynne Dobyns, the Chapter's Ethics Ambassador, summarized an explanation of ethics as standards of behavior that tell us how we ought to act in the many situations in which we find ourselves. These are well-based standards of right and wrong that prescribe what we ought to do. They are the rules you follow even when no one is looking, the sum of your guiding values. This requires, of course, that you have consciously thought about and identified most, if not all, of the values by which you live. That may be our first challenge. Acting ethically requires consistency between our ethical standards and our actions. It also requires that we continually strive to ensure that we, and the institutions we serve, live up to standards that are reasonably solidly based on standards of right and wrong and rules derived from those standards.
What do we do, though, when there is pressure from colleagues, our users or our managers to do something we feel may not be right or we think is downright wrong? These situations provide the challenges we face in striving to act ethically. If doing something, or even not doing something, doesn't "feel right" by our own standards, it probably isn't. The only thing one cannot do when aware of an ethics problem is to do nothing. After getting the facts and evaluating options from an ethical perspective, one must intervene or one becomes part of the problem and bears some of the culpability for the consequences.
The evening's speaker, Geoffrey C. Bowker, is the Executive Director, Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor, Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara University. The Center's mission is to research and promote the use of science and technology for the common good. Geof's main current research interests are in the fields of classification and standardization: in particular asking how these play into the development of scientific cyberinfrastructure. His book, Memory Practices in the Sciences, published by MIT Press in 2006, was awarded the prestigious 2006 ASIS&T Award for "Best Information Science Book" of the year, judged to have made the most outstanding contribution in the field of information science.
Geof focused on three main points of discussion: releasing information, massaging the truth and librarians as ethics ambassadors. He began by stating that we often no longer know who knows what information or what they are doing with it, since information is no longer stored in archival boxes and cross-correlated by those who knew something about the subject matter at the time it was stored or by studying it afterwards. Instead, surveillance is being used to gather data that is mined in many ways. There is increasing pressure for primarily public and academic librarians to release information about their users, the users' records and the print and digital material they have used. He referred to the report, "American Library Association (ALA) Announces Preliminary Findings of Study Measuring Law Enforcement Activity in Libraries," American Library Association, June 20, 2005 http://www.ala.org/ala/pressreleases2005/june2004abc/lawenforcementstudy.cfm (Document ID: 159984). Gathering this information is legal but unethical by professional standards. Fighting this kind of information gathering is made easier by the presence of the profession's strong ethical standards.
