Scott Young
Hi, everyone. This is Scott Young here, and I am delivering this presentation today— "What Is the Right Thing To Do: Looking at LIS Practice through the Lens of Professional Ethics." So I'm Scott Young. I'm the UX and Assessment Librarian at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. This is the Access Conference, the year is 2020, and we are Very Online. I want to say thanks to the conference organizers for bringing together this conference in, in such trying times. So I'm Scott Young. Today's talk is about ethical decision-making in everyday practice of library and information work. So you can find me on Twitter. That's my handle and my website, and the slides, this video recording and a transcript are available on my website right now at this, at this address, I have the long link and the short link there. And the materials will be on the conference website soon too. So the main topics today involve professional values, practical ethics, and ethical dilemmas. So professional values, I drawn Seminelli's definition: the values of a profession are the beliefs of the group. And important here is that the scope of the group is varying. It could be the whole profession. It could be a peer group in your institution. Then practical ethics is the values applied in our professional context. So in a certain situation, what are the values at play? And what—how are we making decisions based on those values? And so then, the ethical dilemmas are situations of uncertainty where different values or value systems may be in conflict. And there's no obvious right course of action. So some of the questions that I'm asking in sort of the work that I'm doing in this area, bringing these three—values, ethics and dilemmas—together, it recognizes that ethical conflict, reflection and resolution represent every person's struggle to make the right decisions. And so some of the questions that I'm asking are which values matter to LIS professionals? Which ethical dilemmas do we commonly confront? And then how do the values that we have articulated, how do they support ethical decision-making and ethical practice? So I don't have all the answers on these right now. Basically, what I've done is I've I've done a systematic literature review to try to get at some of these questions to understand what values are in play, what conflicts do we have, and then how do we arrive at resolutions. And so in this presentation, I present some ethical dilemmas and some decisions in our profession, as I found them in the literature. So the professional values, so this is an interesting one, because we don't have a sort of profession-wide ethical code. We're not like doctors and lawyers where we're licensed and we can be, you know, ejected from the profession. So it's highly contextual, in our profession as to the values, how they're understood and how they're applied. So as a baseline, I kind of looked at the ALA Core Values Statement. There's 12 of them. This, at the very least, is a high profile point of reference for us. It's mentioned a lot. People refer to them. There's lots of different values for different people in context. But this is at least something for us to draw on together. Even though it's not enforceable. It's it's something for us to respond to. And I really appreciated what Emily Drabinksi said here that the values, our values, are continually produced and reproduced in the library discourse, and that they are ideas to be struggled over in both discourse and practice. So let's look at what some of those struggles, what some of the struggles are. I'm looking at ethical dilemmas as real world pressures and tensions that challenge a value-based practice. And I kind of found two main categories, external value systems in conflict and internal values. And sort of how I'm understanding that is, externally these are values involving competing value systems. So personal values, professional values, institutional or any other broader societal values that come into play, that could be capitalism could be feminism. And then so our internal values are just defined within our own profession. So what are the any conflicts involving competing professional values? So if service and privacy are in conflict, for example, what do we do? So let's take a deeper dive on external value systems. So, Smith says that as moral agents (ethical selves), who assume responsibility in their personal, private, professional and public lives, information professionals balance conflicting loyalties, so we're bringing a lot of different value sets to our work.

And Hauptman says it's sometimes inconvenient to further professional values in the real world. And when he says real world, he means the pressures, the constraints and the tensions of all of our external forces, which then results in what Yousefi recognizes as us routinely making decisions that oppose our declared values. So Yousefi acknowledges that pressures to act in accordance with external values often prevent us from enacting our own professional values. And so the stakes of ethical action, in this case, our own personal and our professional integrity, and the trust of our communities. So the main conflict that I found in the literature right now related to external values and conflict is market forces and the LIS profession. Our wider society operates in a global capitalistic system, people and entities within the system, like us as librarians, are influenced necessarily by the pressures and the values of the market economy, and the values of that market economy, efficiency, flexibility competition, they can stand at odds with our professional values, such as the public good, privacy, diversity, social responsibility. Those are ALA Core Values, you may have others, but they are often in conflict with capitalistic values. And so this tension has been with us for some time. Melville Dewey founded the ALA in 1876, with the motto "The best reading for the largest number at the least cost." Now my own personal values lead me to think that this is not an inspiring motto, but actually, it's still the motto of the ALA—it was reaffirmed not too long ago. But even in his own time, Dewey's alignment with market values of like return-on-investment and resource efficiency was met with resistance from within the profession. Librarian Mary Salome Cutler Fairchild, Vice President of ALA in 1895, remarked that Dewey's motto "smacks of arithmetic and commerce." That, to me is inspiring. So we have this century long unresolved tension on the one hand, the commercial ideals of efficiency and profit, and on the other competing LIS ideals of social responsibility, community, and the public good. So the main tension is—does our profession operate as a market good, or as a public good. So let's look at one way this is expressed: information technologies, data, and privacy.

So

Privacy has become a well-established value among brands, this is long held for us, to the point of being described as a cornerstone value of the profession's ethical foundation. But at the same time, we develop and purchase information technologies in support of service and access. These can be third-party technologies that are developed by other companies, for the purposes of e-commerce coming from a sort of business perspective, not necessarily aligned with what we want. And so as an understatement, we can say not all information technologies are designed with privacy in mind. Even with our own profession. This could be somewhat difficult when we develop our own technologies, accounting for for all of that. So then the question is, how do we respond? So here's one potential dilemma that represents this. This is like an ethical vignette sort of meant to prompt our reflection. So in this situation, in order to assess the library website, the assessment librarian is considering implementing new analytic software that captures screen recordings of website visits. The analytics software is operated by privately owned third party, and the screen recordings would be stored on the company's cloud servers, which could affect the privacy of library users. But the advanced analytics would be applied to improve library web services. In this case, the librarian decides to implement the software. The dilemma is actually based on a personal experience of mine. Earlier in my time, as a librarian, I implemented on our library's website, a third-party software called HotJar, not sure if you have used HotJar, but it provides some pretty amazing analytics. It does heat maps. It does screen recordings. It does even some key logging so you can see what user searches are. And so I thought that this would give us really good data to help improve our website, and it kind of did, but then as I became more attuned ethically to the values of our profession and recognized this as a dilemma, then I thought about it again, I said, Okay, maybe this isn't right for us, you know, this actually doesn't help us as much as it does, according to the cost of sacrificing privacy or intellectual freedom for our users. So we had it installed, we removed it. But this dilemma is real, because there's all sorts of technologies out there that we could implement on our websites, that may be in conflict with our own internal values. So some ethical prompts, we could ask, ask here: what is the likelihood that you would take the same action as this librarian? Why or why not? Which values—personal, professional or institutional—are operating in this scenario? and how else could the situation be resolved? Okay, so moving from the external conflicts, let's take a look at some internal internal conflicts. A very prominent in this situation. The, the way the ethical dilemma works is that we're faced with multiple paths of action for enacting different professional values. So the decisions in this case focus on which values prioritize the actions that we take and and whether or how to complete a task that may be in violation of our values. So the main challenge here in what I found in the literature was challenging professional neutrality. So neutrality is very interesting concept. And it's something that is really deep in our profession. So bringing forward this quote from the 60s, not to beat up on the 60s too much, but librarian Foskett said in the 60s: "A good librarian must be able as a professional to undergo rapid, chameleon-like changes as one enquirer follows another. If he has no politics, no religion, no morals, he can have all politics, all religion, all morals." So, of course, the librarian is not a lizard. As a complex human actor, a librarian must balance competing demands in a complex multi stakeholder environment, sure, but at the same time, recognizing that there is individual viewpoints and values at play. So let's look at how this has evolved over time. The main conflict relating to neutrality is that it's really such a deeply-held position, we have the quote from Foskett in the 60s. And that position is understood to be almost an assumption of librarianship, dating, dating all the way back to Dewey again in 1876, where neutrality was seen as a way to maintain objectivity and eliminate bias in the relationship between the library patron and the library professional. And it's also sometimes seen as underlying our claim to the public good. But today, we're re-engaging and we're re-evaluating the the concept and the application neutrality. So the question now sort of sees neutrality as a claim to being beyond the reach of politics. But but we're not beyond the reach of politics. And we're not beyond the reach of self-examination either. So, neutrality is kind of seen as an untenable position and and an incoherent position, because LIS is a profession with a social history that has specific political and social contexts. And so enacting a professional value is itself taking a stand, not neutral. So let's look at what this looks like in cataloguing and classification. This is a really rich area that a lot of us are familiar with.

So catalogers have what Olson has notably described as "the power to name"—the ability to describe and represent an information object, which in turn, affects the access and use of that object, and can also help or harm depending on how it's described and who's accessing the article. So, the question here in ethical cataloguing is how do we understand and apply that power, and the decisions that catalogers make are not always so clear. So here, neutrality is especially entrenched because of the desired appearance of a positivist, rational, scientific, and technical objectivity, for our profession. And the idea that such a, like a knowable and known universe of knowledge from which a book could be drawn, was seen as a practical construct that was beneficial from the viewpoint of customer service efficiency. And that again, goes back to Dewey, that's what Dewey wanted. ~Dewey~ But in counterpoint, others are viewing classification classification schemas today as a product of individual human effort, thus inherently subjective and political. So for catalogers who are engaging in this, the ethical dilemmas and contradictions of, of classification—any act of naming or classifying is an act of saying something about the world, and such an act is always done from a particular perspective. So our classification systems have been historically constructed by members of the dominant group, and can perpetuate certain biases and stereotypes that harm or exclude others from traditionally marginalized identities. Maintaining a posture of neutrality does not allow for these exclusions to be addressed. So even though classification schemes have been built as objective tools for accessing a stable knowledge, stable universe of knowledge, they're now being re-examined as sites of ethical and political work. So here's one dilemma. The assessment librarian is assessing the arrangement and description of a new special collection of materials related to accessibility initiatives at the university. The librarian considers inviting disabled members of the community to be participants in the assessment process as they could provide a relevant cultural perspective. But the assessment librarian is unsure if it's appropriate to include them. Since they are not information professionals and they have no assessment training. Project planning would also be more complicated with community involvement. The assessment librarian ultimately decides not to involve the community members. So in this dilemma, some reflection prompts: what's the likelihood that you would take the same action? Which values are applying here—are operating—and and how else could it be resolved? The values here might be participation, democracy, but versus professionalism. So how do we sort of make our way through this and know what is the right thing to do? So I actually don't have those answers. It's I'm doing all this reading kind of this research project to get a sense of what what are the right questions to ask and which are the (oops), the right situations to ask those questions in. Preer tells us that ultimately, ethics is about choices. So knowing when the choice is presented, and then knowing how to make it. And so I can offer some recommendations for practice, just to kind of get us thinking. First is value identification. What are your ideals, your standards, principles, beliefs about the profession? And then where do they come from? Are they drawn from your personal background, community? Do they come from the tradition of feminism? Do they come from tradition of disability studies? And then how are you accountable to them? How do you apply them and if it doesn't, if you're not able to achieve them, or enact them, what happens then? And so next is ethical attunement: recognizing values and conflicts, values and conflict wherever they are in your area. So like, drawing on my own experience, when I installed the analytics software on the website, I didn't initially recognize that as a dilemma, I want to improve web services. But I also want to help my users achieve privacy. So I didn't really see that at the time. So over time, I've been trying to attune myself to when ethical reflections and points of decision-making arise so that I can make better decisions. And so that can happen through through critical self-reflection. So creating a dialogue space for working through difficult situations with trusted colleagues, and ultimately getting to the the answer of what's the right decision for you based on your values and in your context. So I just want to finish briefly by highlighting one example of what this looks like in practice. This is an example from the Rockefeller Archive Center in New York State,. They have a discovery layer project that they've called Project Electron. This is so great, because they say that they lead by saying that it's a values-driven project. And then they are they state their values. They've done the work internally to say what they are, and they've published them externally for accountability. They say that they are their values are to create reproduce—reproducible and modular deliverables, placing users at the center of the process, supporting archival practices and standards, and supporting data in motion.

So it's just a great example because they have said what their values are. Their project team has developed them, then if they have conflicts or points of decision through their process, they can return to the values and say, which values here are operating, which one's more important, how do we make this decision, and the values can help them know that they're acting ethically for them in their context. Okay, so that brings us to the end. Thank you for listening and watching. So you can find me at these places. I'll be available right after this for a live Q&A. So we'll talk to you soon. Thanks.