Ethics in the Age of Technological Change and its Impact on the Professional Identity of Librarians

Abstract

Professional ethics and core values provide professionals with guidance for their actions by helping professionals determine what constitutes right and wrong professional action. Because they are written for and by librarians, these documents offer one articulation of librarians’ professional identities. This chapter examines the core values of librarianship with an eye to how they articulate the relationship librarians have with technology. These documents illustrate that librarians understand technology to be a tool that is used to meet the information needs of users. The Social Construction Of Technology (SCOT) is discussed as an alternative approach to the understanding of technology by LIS professionals. SCOT examines the social processes that are behind the development of technologies and highlights how different social groups contribute to the social meaning and even use of technology. SCOT provides an expanded view of ethics that encourages librarians to not only consider their professional ethics when implementing a new technology but also the intentions of the technology’s developers, its various users, and their local communities. To illustrate the potential of SCOT for librarians, this chapter explores an examination of how librarians have managed the ethical challenges that Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has brought to library services, followed by an examination of how librarians interpret their ethical role as service providers.