In today’s world, individuals can make a single decision that can have a positive or negative effect on their family, coworkers, friends, or on the entire world. However, the life we lead can reflect our personal character. Therefore, personal ethics are different for each one of us. However, when we work in a professional career, we have our own work character to reflect on. What is professional ethics? “Professional ethics concerns the moral issues that arise because of the specialist knowledge that professionals attain, and how the use of this knowledge should be governed when providing a service to the public” (Chadwick 1998). Today, Librarianship is a profession that has a code of professional ethics to help us to behave a
A library is a place where free exchange of ideas is available to all patrons regardless of their background. An example of this is the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) is when “public and school libraries cannot receive federal monies to provide access to the Internet unless they have an Internet access policy, and employ filtering software that blocks child pornography, images that are obscene, or items deemed harmful to juveniles” (Rubin 2004, 155). ALA opposes this because it affects the library users’ free access to information.
Article III is when patrons believe that they have a right to privacy and confidentiality regarding to their library usage and professionals support these rights. However, this all changed due to September 11, 2001 when the USA Patriot Act passed to allow the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to get “involved in foreign intelligence investigations to wiretap, search, … that can secretly identify the addresses of telephone calls…could track an individual’s communication from a public phone, or an email” (Rubin 2004, 133). The second issue of Code of Ethics is Rights of Authors and Creators. The Code of Ethics stresses an importance on service to patrons therefore, the producers or creators of information are critical participants in the service process that they deserve ethical manner. Article IV states the Intellectual property includes products like patents, trademarks, and