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Abstract
This article addresses the context and content of ethical activities and decisions in knowledge organization and cataloging. It presents the core value of access to information as stated in three professional codes of ethics and shows how these codes govern consensual issues in knowledge organization and classification. The codes, however, do not address non-consensual issues. In conclusion, the paper provides some basic guidelines for establishing ethical policies for knowledge organization and cataloging and shows how they can be implemented consistently using Ethics Toolkit.
Introduction
Ethics "tell people how to act in ways that meet the standard our values set for us" (http://www.ethics.org/faq.html#eth_what. Accessed May 21, 2005), and applied ethics is a field that "attempts to deal with specific realms of human action and to craft criteria for discussion of issues that might arise within those realms" (http://caae.phil.cmu.edu/cavalier/80130/part2/II_preface.html. Accessed March 23, 2005). Professional ethics falls within the domain of applied ethics, and a profession may be defined as "a number of individuals in the same occupation voluntarily organized to earn a living by openly serving a certain moral ideal in a morally-permissible way beyond what law, market, and morality would otherwise require" (Davis, 2002, p. 3). In this context, professional codes of ethics provide guidelines for helping members of the profession develop ethical policies for their work and their workplace. These codes of applied ethics enunciate important general principles, but they do not necessarily help individuals deal with a specific ethical problem. According to Beyerstein (1993), professional codes of ethics reflect the consensus of the professionals for whom they are written, and for that reason cannot also help resolve ethical cases on which no consensus exists. Thus, professional codes can only help in judging obvious cases in which no particular ethical difficulties arise.
In the library and information science professions, the codes of the professional associations include ethical statements that clearly apply to the practice of knowledge organization and cataloging (e.g., IFLA, ALA, ALCTS). These codes are subject to the constraint that Beyerstein (1993) recognized. That is, they consist of statements on "motherhood" issues to which no one in the profession would object. For example, all three professional codes include statements enshrining the professional ideal of access to information. IFLA suggests that library associations...