Just as the common good in society demands equilibrium between individual- ism and order—between the demands of the self and the good of all—the prac- tice of librarianship demands equilibrium between tradition and innovation, the old and the new, the needs of the many and the needs of minorities or individ- uals. The task is to use the three lanterns of our values (service, intellectual freedom, equity of access), our code of ethics, and the Eightfold Path and con- comitant virtues to light our way as we wrestle with the issues, dilemmas, and problems of the age in which we live and work. In negotiating these issues, we must always seek harmony, balance, and the middle way. The following are some areas in which the search for equilibrium is most important:
• Collections: electronic resources and “traditional” resources
• Establishing priorities in the allocation of resources to various library activities, services, and programs
• Serving the common good and meeting the needs of the individual
• Bridging the library divide
• Making progress through collaboration and cooperation
• Balancing the demands of library working life with the other areas of life
• Preserving the human record
I have already discussed the nature of modern collections in previous chap- ters and how they must reach out to encompass not only remote electronic resources, but also those materials held by other libraries that are readily avail- able through library cooperation made feasible by technology. Right thought, right action, and universal friendliness lead us to participate in such resource- sharing and other cooperative schemes in a fair and moral manner—that is, by playing our full part and not exploiting the situation by contributing less than we derive. Taking the latter path is not only unethical but also, as so often in life, impractical and counterproductive. All collaborations ultimately depend on good faith and mutuality of interest buttressed by a sincere wish to play one’s part. Each party balances its needs against its capability to contribute, and the ethical thing to do is also the practically beneficial thing to do.
There is also the question of balance between expenditures on electronic materials and those on print and other tangible materials. In this area, right thought is that which is not influenced by fads and societal pressures but which instead sees the situation clearly, recognizing the strengths, weaknesses, and value of each form of communication. Once this clarity of thought is achieved, all falls into place and one is able to set priorities and make resource allocations for different kinds of library material in a balanced and productive manner.
Another resource allocation issue lies in the question of equitable and bal- anced funding for different programs, departments, and services within the library. Here again balance and clarity are all. As we all know, libraries are chron- ically underfunded, which makes it even more important that such funds as we have are distributed efficiently and fairly. One particular area in which many library administrators have not demonstrated mindfulness, right thought, or right action is that of the balance between public services (chiefly reference and instruction) and technical processing (cataloguing, acquisitions, etc.). Libraries that used to have large and productive acquisitions and cataloguing depart- ments have downgraded and degraded those services to the point at which they have become deprofessionalized, demoralized, and unproductive. Forty or more years ago, such departments were wasteful of professional resources in that they often assigned clerical and quasi-professional work to librarians. The OCLC in particular, and other aspects of library automation in general, pointed up the folly of that approach, making it possible to shrink the size of technical pro- cessing departments and concentrate professional work in professional hands.
These should all have been positive developments but, as it turns out, have often been negative. Many administrators have treated technical processing, par- ticularly cataloguing and the professional quotient of acquisitions work, as an irrelevant drain on the library’s purse. There is an academic library in California in which everyemployee with an M.L.S. degree works in the reference/instruc- tion department. In such a library, acquisitions is treated as a purely clerical operation that is at the mercy of the library’s vendors; and original cataloguing is not done, or done by library assistants, or sold off to outsourcers and other commercial services. Not only has such a library lost a great deal of expertise (one does not envy them when next acquiring and installing an online system without cataloguing expertise to sustain them), but it has also fatally wounded its collection development program, degraded its catalogue, and failed to play its part in collaborative enterprises by failing to add high-quality catalogue records to the joint database. Such misguided priorities cannot be viewed as ethical. All users of the library are entitled to a budgetary and financial structure that funds the programs and services they need, and that maintains the pillars of the library (its bibliographic architecture and public services) equally.
We have seen that the tension between the needs and wants of the individ- ual and the needs of society lies at the heart of our ethical considerations.
Libraries are creations of society and are sustained by society, but they are there for individuals and for minorities as small as one. Here again, we need ethical lamps to ensure that we can find a balance. Look, for example, at the idea that collections in small libraries and those in small communities should be gov- erned by “community standards”—a doctrine that has led to the many sad absurdities chronicled in the ALA’s annual list of challenged and banned books.
A public library in a small town is there to serve the inhabitants of that town, but should its collection development policy be based on the opinions of the majority (as divined in their “community standards”) and thus prevent a teen- aged library user from reading The Catcher in the Rye?In short, we are for the common good but do not take a majoritarian or even utilitarian point of view.
The common good is the good of each individual in a community funded col- lectively, not the good of those in the community who think alike. Ultimately, the belief that the common good is advanced by the freedom of the individual restricted only by adherence to the Golden Rule is at the heart of library ethics.
In particular, the freedom of the individual to read, write, and think whatever he or she wishes is a central issue. Will that always lead to right thought and right speech in all cases? Of course not, but it is the task of the individual to try to achieve right thought on his or her own—it cannot be imposed. The ethical path leads always to the defense of freedom of thought, reading, and expression,
but it is a path that is difficult to follow in some situations, especially in the case of small and unpopular minorities.
The ethics of the library divide are quite clear and should in theory present few dilemmas to any librarian. Collectively and individually, we deplore the inequities in the provision of library services that mirror the deep inequities in the wider society. We would, if we could, remove them so that the very poor had access to library services every bit as good as those enjoyed by the affluent, and every child and old person had a well-stocked, well-staffed, technologically advanced library close at hand. However, we have to deal with the world as it is—a world not devoted to the ideals of universal friendliness and the common good, but one that accepts and even, in some cases, welcomes inequities and differences in matters great and small. The ethical quandary that faces each librarian devoted to equity of library service is the degree to which he or she should work in the wider societal and political context to bring about changes that will narrow the library divide. In doing so, one is taking a decided stance in the eternal battle between tradition and progress on the side of the latter. At that point, the best thing one can be called is “progressive,” with other, harsher words just around the corner. The librarians who established free public libraries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were regarded, quite correctly, as on the side of social change and opposed to the side of reac- tion. Librarians today who argue for a more equitable dispersion of resources in society—knowing that it is the only way to narrow the library divide—will also be regarded as being “on the left,” which of course they are, if being “on the right” means being in favor of preserving the existing order. The existing order includes the library divide and all the other inequities in society. Those who want to change that order, out of compassion, clarity, and right thought are, of necessity, on the side of change and progress. It is no coincidence that librari- ans, in this respect, are very similar to those who labor in similar vineyards—
teaching, social work, nursing, etc. Temperamentally, most librarians are not in- clined to revolutionary change (probably because of the order and stability that most libraries and library services require), but in this case they have had to choose sides, even if only to stand on the moderate side of the progressive wing.
Libraries have always cooperated when they could, but that cooperation was limited for many years by practicalities of the technology of the day. There were union card catalogues, but the problems of maintaining them and the impossibility of keeping them current made them fallible instruments of library cooperation. Cooperative (as opposed to centralized) cataloguing was very dif- ficult in the pre-automation era. The lack of modern communications technol- ogy tended to isolate libraries in many ways. All this started to change rapidly
in the age of library automation and bibliographic standardization that began in the early 1970s. Libraries could contribute to and use shared databases that were completely current and, since they were based on commonly agreed stan- dards (MARC, AACR2,etc.), reasonably coherent. At a later stage, the catalogues of other libraries, even those not participating in one’s own shared database, became available. The crowning achievement was the OCLC database—the nearest thing to a universal bibliography the world has ever seen—linked to a global resource-sharing system. All these schemes worked and still work because libraries participated in them in an ethical manner and in the spirit of universal friendliness.
Another set of ethical issues is posed by libraries of different kinds collabo- rating on projects in the same locality. Each library is funded differently and has a different mission. The balance sought is one that weighs the needs of the pop- ulation the library is funded to serve and the needs of the users of the other libraries involved in the collaborative project. The interests of the two are not necessarily antithetical and good projects are those in which everyone benefits, but ethical dilemmas do arise when the interests of one group clash with the interests of another.
Librarians, like the members of any other profession, live in several worlds simultaneously. Though in many ways we have lost the sense of mission and a higher calling that is found in writings from Melvil Dewey to Lawrence Clark Powell, most of us have some sense of vocation—an ethic of service to individ- uals and our community and to the high ideals of learning—that leaches out from our working life into our other lives. Just as a doctor is a doctor when not practicing medicine, the typical librarian is a librarian in most of her waking hours. The incurable itch to inform, to make orderly, to communicate our love of reading and knowledge, is still present in many of us, even when we are not actually pursuing our livelihood. This used to be entirely a bookish profession.
It is less so now, but most of us know (or are) a librarian whose hobby, often carried out with the help of computers, employs many of our library skills and interests. I have known librarians who are gourmet cooks with beautifully orga- nized databases of recipes retrievable by any combination of variables. There are librarians who have created web pages devoted to the Rolling Stones, the tarot, or Indonesian politics that are marvels of organization and retrievability. Happy is the club whose secretary is a librarian—you can be sure that its records are detailed and organized and its archives scrupulously maintained. The balance we seek is not that of sealed and compartmentalized aspects of our lives but one in which work life, family life, and our other lives each inform the other and all are infused with right thought, speech, and action.
We have an ethical imperative to extend our universal friendliness and right action to future generations by carrying out our unique responsibility to pre- serve the human record and transmit it to future generations. Our Code of Ethics tells us that we have a responsibility to serve all library users, and what are collection development and cataloguing but actions taken on behalf of all future users of the library as well as those now living? Beyond these individual acts in individual libraries, we as a profession have a responsibility to the human record that transcends almost any other issue facing librarianship today. We cannot and must not shirk this duty, because to do so would be to fail ethically as well as in practical terms. Here again the watchwords are balance and harmony married to clarity of thought. There are many proposed paths to the preservation of the human record. We need to think about each of them and weigh the consequences of each.