The Virtual Library: Changing Roles and Ethical Challenges for Librarians

Since the 1930s, the Library Bill of Rights has acknowledged the ethical responsibility of librarians to provide access to information in all formats to all people. Librarians are charged with selecting, organizing, and instructing patrons on how to locate and use the resources, and preserving information regardless of format or technology. The information revolution and the pervasive thinking that everything is available on the Web have created new challenges to these traditional professional ethics. Acquiring and providing dependable access to electronic resources require librarians to learn and apply new skills such as negotiating license agreements and understanding evolving technologies. Print publications provide a degree of permanence, but e-information, if it is not properly managed, can be highly transient. Internet services provide large, uncontrolled, unregulated collection of resources. If the very nature of the Internet makes it nearly if not completely impossible to evaluate the content of web-sites, how does the librarian protect the integrity of the information the library provides? Along with traditional ethical conflicts, librarians in the virtual library are faced with new challenges to provide equitable access to usefully organized resources, to address petitions to deselect or filter, to negotiate less-restrictive licensing policies, and to maintain the anonymity of individual users within electronic transactions.