TISHLILS(HTBPA): An Actually Useful Set of Ethics

[silveradept]

This one is a bit of a hybrid, in that it is entirely about the use of skills that I learned in library school, but how to apply them in this particular manner has been something that I've had to learn over time.

The setup is that someone is here at the help desk and is looking for books on "people's rights to their body about vaccines" and the laws around such things.

This is an ethical quandary for an information professional, even though it might not look like it at first blush. After all, the Internet is absolutely chock-full of people who have opinions about whether vaccination mandates are legal or whether the freedom to control someone's own body must be subordinated to public health needs or the needs of other people not to get sick from you. And most of the things you will find with a cursory Internet search that are available for free are from people who make claims that they are experts in their field, or that the solution is clear and easy, but they are neither properly expert nor is the solution as simple as they are going to portray it. Furthermore, around vaccination and SARS-CoV-2, there's more than enough misinformation, disinformation, lies and conspiracy theories around that there's a lot of chaff to sift out looking for the grains of wheat. As easy as it would be to print something out, especially if it were something that agreed with the person asking's already formed opinion on the matter (I have my suspicions, with the way the person is asking the question about what resources we have, and they also talk as an example, about the papers that hypothesized that vaccination causes autism as possible sources to use), I'm supposed to give people accurate information on the matter from reputable sources, so this is going to take a while.

Furthermore, when I start searching for what I think will be the best phrase to use, "bodily autonomy," the search engine helpfully reminds me that this phrase has long since been in use in all of the debates over whether or not a pregnant person has the right to terminate their pregnancy or whether they are to be reduced to nothing more than a host for the fetus until birth. That complicates the results, but it makes sense that both abortion and vaccination would have questions around when it is appropriate for the state to step in and mandate measures in the name of protecting health.

I do manage to find an opinion written in the New York Times from ACLU members who endorse vaccination mandates, but the Grey Lady is paywalled, and our database access conveniently leaves out the opinion column for the day where the opinion was published. Thankfully, the ACLU had their own copy on their website that I could print off.

Eventually, it turned out that we also had a book in the collection, on the shelves at my location, that's about the intersections of law and public policy with regard to previous and current pandemics and public health crises, written by someone who at least got the right kind of degree to be a potential expert on the subject. So, article and book in hand (even better, the book is short and in a small size, so it should be fairly easy to read), we send the person asking on their way. I have no idea whether they thought the resources provided would be good ones, or whether they intend to reject them out of hand for not having ideological compliance with the reader's predetermined beliefs and not offering them solutions in how to avoid mandates for themselves and their children.

It took some significant time, though, to get resources that I was willing to say were likely to pass being reputable and that were on the topic presented. The reasons why I took so much time are at the heart of the ethical question with this reference request. At least some faction of the library world believes that a library worker's right and proper duty to their requesters is to provide the requester with the information or data they have requested, according to whatever parameters have been set forth in the request, without any editorializing or suggestion that the material being sought or the question being asked is of low quality or fundamentally flawed in ways that are clear to the library worker. The need for "neutrality" and not taking any sort of political stance is the most important part to this faction, because they fear that allowing any library worker to express an opinion on something opens up the entirety of the library to express their opinions or to be challenged that their opinion on the matter is wrong. Or, for example, that letting a librarian steer someone to the place where scientific information on sex ed is also means that the organization can't stop a different librarian from always steering their people to the section that asserts sex ed is sinful and wrong and that abstinence and ignorance are the only things for an unmarried person to have when it comes to sex.

The ethics of neutrality are still being debated in library circles, even with more evidence piling up that neutrality is a harmful stance to take, one that ultimately sides with those who suppress and do violence instead of those who try to fight it. The competing ethical arguments say that libraries should be in the business of providing accurate information where possible, and that harmful materials in our collections, where discovered, should be removed so more of our communities will feel welcome at the library. In my professional judgment, this inquiry wasn't someone trying to look for all sides of the question to produce an academic work or similar, it was someone looking for justification for their own beliefs on the matter, and any side that agreed with them would do, so I felt the ethical thing to do was provide them with the best information I could find that would give them an accurate picture and let them do their reasoning from there. In the wider context of what's happening in schools and libraries, and especially in the wake of increased challenges and assertions by parents and administrators alike that the professional judgment and training of the librarian or educator about the appropriateness of a work in class or the library collection should be subordinated to the personal whims of parents, legislators, or administrators who are not trained or are choosing not to use their training, using and standing by your professional judgment seems more fraught and less generally accepted as the correct thing to do. (It's not lost on me that this sudden crisis of confidence in professionals coincides with the acceptance and integration of materials into schools and libraries (and society) that are more accurately portraying the history, culture, and reality of minoritized groups in relation to the hegemony of the straight white cis man.)

It's fascinating, sometimes, to see how what would have been an uncontroversial thing to say under previous cultural assumptions has exploded into being a highly contested issue once those cultural assumptions are unearthed or disputed. I feel like this is the true implementation of "defeat bad speech with more speech," as opposed to the way that the people most loudly claiming they're being cancelled tend to think of it, which is much more "my speech is important, yours is not, so my good speech should stay intact and your bad speech should go away."

So, yeah, this was the kind of request that needed care and assistance to make sure someone got correct (or more correct) information instead of what would have confirmed any biases they had but provided nothing useful for them. Which somehow seems like a more radical activity than it really should have, because the ethics we got installed from library school often recommend counterproductive courses of action for situations that require nuance or that could conflict with other possible ethics, like the ethics of whether it's okay to provide the address and phone number in a people database you subscribe to because someone claims to be looking for them to reconnect or to send them a friendly card or other such.

The library world is well overdue for an overhaul of our moral and ethical frames, and while we're at it, can we apply a new classification system that doesn't really on the racist and other -ist mindset of either Thomas Jefferson or Melvil Dewey? And possibly find a way to get the national organization to not only elect a board and officers all of color, but to also then take active stances on issues that decry one side of another of them as wrong, in our professional opinion. That kind of encouragement could potentially do a lot of work towards making a better set of ethics for library people.

Comments

[lilysea]

What is the library ethics when someone is working from a flawed premise?

Eg, there were IQ tests in the past where Black people scored lower, but this was due to the IQ tests prioritising certain types of cultural knowledge/certain styles of language use rather than anything to do with intelligence.

There are original outdated/racist published books/articles trumpeting this as evidence of white people being more intelligent [lets call these books/articles X]

these have now been fully rebutted and discredited by more recent books/articles pointing out the flawed cultural assumptions and language use assumptions that the IQ tests were using [lets call these books/articles Y]

What do you do if a patron comes in looking for X? Do you try to steer them towards Y?

[vass]

It's definitely a conflict. As you pointed out, in an oppressive world, 'neutrality' often means siding with the oppressors.

What worries me is who decides what's reputable and accurate (when it's not the status quo), and how?

The medical consensus on whether people who are eligible for vaccination against Covid should get vaccinated is very solid, and I think you and I are in agreement with the medical consensus on this subject.

But there are other issues where... well, suppose the CDC makes a recommendation that is clearly politically or economically motivated rather than sound medical advice, or even which appears to be outright eugenics. What do you do in that situation, when a client asks "should I, a vaccinated adult who is not assessed as being at high risk from Covid, still be wearing a mask? I want a reputable source, please, and I'll go with what they recommend."

Do you give them the epidemiologists saying "this advice isn't good, most people still aren't vaccinated even if you are, here are the Long Covid rates for low risk adults, here's what's happening to children currently, here's what's at stake for high risk people if they catch it from you, please keep wearing masks"?

Or do you give them the national public health agency of the United States?

And then there's stuff like the efficacy and safety of deliberate weight loss, or of different specific diets, or whether people with ME/CFS should do graded exercise, or the incidence of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

Owning my own opinions here, for context: deliberate weight loss is neither safe nor effective; graded exercise is ineffective and harmful for people with ME/CFS and the PACE trials were obscenely badly designed and carried out; and we don't really know how common Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is, but chances are it's not rare rare, just underdiagnosed and understudied.

Of course I think I have good opinions on these issues, but none of them are the prevailing current medical opinion in the way that, say, "get your Covid shots" is. Luckily, I'm not a librarian. But the Christian Scientist librarian who thinks prayer is the only valid treatment for cancer is presumably just as convinced her opinions are good, and just as aware that her opinion is out of step with the medical establishment. What should she do?

(Or, of course, less subtly, what do you do when a third-grader comes in looking for resources on LGBTQ issues, and you're a teacher librarian working in Florida? Apart from cry and/or smash things, I mean.)

I don't believe true neutrality actually exists[*], so maybe the best one can do is simply owning one's biases and contextualising the sources where possible.

[* Except maybe in Dungeons and Dragons, in which I suspect if one had to assign each person one and only one alignment for their whole lives, I suspect "true neutral" would be nearly everyone's.]

[brokenallbroken]

I don't believe true neutrality actually exists

This is a point I brought up in our department's last DEI meeting. Refusing to choose is also a choice. Cataloging is really in the middle of this right now, although at least LOC finally approved using "undocumented immigrants" instead of "illegal aliens". I anticipate a long debate as to what exactly "least harm to our users" means in the near future, given the breadth of our user base. I personally fail to see how greater inclusivity could harm anyone, but some people seem to feel left out and unseen when more people are acknowledged.

[thewayne]

There's also the problem of "with rights come responsibilities". While you do have the right to be informed and control what goes into your body, do you really have the right to control someone else's pregnancy, and do you have the right to infect someone else with a potentially deadly virus? I'm immune-compromised (as you know), your passing on the virus to me could possibly kill me. So get the bloody vaccine! One of the two mRNA vaccines, possibly both, have now been fully approved by the FDA, not just emergency approval.

I know you're not an ILL person, there is an ILL mailing list where you can ask for stuff that you can't easily get ahold of, such as an NYT op ed, that other people with subscriptions can get you easily. I can get you that URL if you like. I suggest having an easily checked sinkhole email as that list can generate 30-40 emails a day no problem.

[silveradept]

Library ethics hasn't fully caught up to this question. We're supposed to ask questions of people who want materials to get a clearer sense of what they want and why, which can make it easier to find a good course of action. A person who wants X because they're doing research on the attitudes prevalent in X for academic work is much more likely to get X, because they're specifically looking at X. (And also is hopefully smart enough to be asking at the academic and special collections where X is likely to be kept for such research purposes.) For people who want X to confirm their personal prejudices, the collection we have as a public library is much more likely to contain Y instead and that's what someone gets directed to. Which pushes the ethical responsibility onto the people who buy collection and maintain it to make sure that misleading, inaccurate, and superceded material isn't in the circulating collection in the first place.

For something that has a certain amount of definition to the line, like IQ tests, it's a lot easier to weed out the inaccurate and misleading. When it comes to fiction or punditry, I personally say that we still have the obligation not to carry misleading, inaccurate, or deliberately harmful and inflammatory material in our current collections, (unless the library or archive specifically collects that material as part of a research project or to aid researchers) but official statements from the overarching organizations recommend that we carry a diversity of viewpoints, with the clear implication that racist or other -ist thinking, or popular "classics" with discriminatory viewpoints should also have shelf space because "neutrality," not taking sides about what views are right and wrong, and not making assumptions about the purpose by which or people are asking for materials.

The good thing is that here in the States, there are several groups and people making cogent and eloquent arguments that neutrality was only ever a fig leaf for white supremacy and the like and libraries need to actively make their spaces and collections more welcoming for a greater amount of cultures and experiences (that, or drop the talking point that libraries are for everyone and admit up front that our institution is only interested in catering to specific audiences, usually white Christian cis men and women.)

[silveradept]

Conveniently, those people who claim they're being left out and unseen when more people are acknowledged tend to be the people who stand to lose the most power or who will have to come to grips with the idea that they are no longer the unquestioned (hegemonic) default and their opinion might not be given disproportionate weight in a discussion.

Thank goodness LC was finally able to get that subject change through all of the political grandstanding and Republicans insisting the discriminatory heading had to start because they wanted people to judge the undocumented in their research.

[lilysea]

Thanks for explaining/unpacking

sometime between 1995 and 2003 I went to my local public library

and they had an outdated British book on Urinary Tract Infections in women (publication date 1980s or early 1990s)

that said that if women got recurring urinary tract infections, they should be suspicious that their male partners might be bisexual and cheating on them with a men

At the time I was like

"well, that's not accurate information AND it's biphobic as hell"

but I was too intimidated by the (extremely grumpy) librarians to talk to them about taking the book out of the collection and maybe replacing it with something more recent and more accurate.

I still regret that, altho I am bad with assertiveness AND I was terrified of these librarians

(they once bit my head off quite badly for very politely asking if the library could purchase a popular novel that they did not carry, saying "we can't just buy every book that someone wants to read!")

[silveradept]

I suspect many of the people moaning the most about their rights as individuals and their freedoms are most likely to disclaim any social responsibility at all for their actions and decisions, and that if you end up catching the deadly disease, or getting pregnant, that's your fault and nobody else should have to help you if they don't want to. They know it's a lie, because they also tend to believe that a person in a service job needs to act properly servile, or a person receiving some scrap of charity needs to abase themselves thoroughly for the ego gratification of the person giving. It's very much the idea of some people (Them) being bound but not protected and others (Us) being protected but not bound.

I could use the ILL group, even though it's probably pretty rare that I'd use it for anything.

[thewayne]

Try https://www.oclc.org/forms/internet-subscription.en.html.  All of their lists are organized there.  ILL-L is the list that you want, or at least the list that I am referring to.  There are others that might be of interest to you.

[silveradept]

On most questions of the practice of law, medicine, and accounting we are expressly instructed to punt on any question of interpretation, because we are not qualified to do that, even if we are qualified to do that but working outside the context where it would be relevant. (A law librarian may have a Juris Doctorate, but they will also likely punt on questions of interpretation, because they're not being paid to be a lawyer.) Which is why the question in the post is phrased as "I need to find reputable sources" and "That point of view doesn't have a lot of scientific consensus" rather than "You're interpreting the text from the wrong perspective," because the first two are statements of fact and the last is an opinion that could result in discipline if the person receiving the opinion wants to complain about "bias" in the library worker.

So there's a dance that has to be done when it comes to these less clear questions, as most organizations make it clear that when you step on shift, your opinions are the opinions of the library system, as wrought in policy and procedure, and you are not supposed to use your own personal opinions on anything at all. In theory, this equally keeps the Christian Scientist librarian from going to the prayer healing books when someone asks about controlling a condition, the evangelical librarian from going to the abstinence books when someone asks about sex ed, and the atheist librarian from taking someone to fairy tale collections when someone asks for a religious work. (In practice, our life experiences absolutely influence our decisions, for good and ill, and what we should be aiming for is finding ways of shoring up the gaps in our own knowledge so that we are constantly trying to do the least amount of racism, sexism, transmisia, and so on.)

So, in the question of who do you count ass good source for someone asking about masking, they probably would get something that's geared for the level of medical jargon they are comfortable with that takes into account the current scientific perspectives. Ideally it would be something that says "If you are vaccinated fully, here's where you're required to mask still, and here are the risks involved, to you and others, if you choose not to mask in a mask-optional space. If you're not fully vaccinated, you're a major infection risk to yourself and others, get vaccinated, and then come back for the other part of this piece." so that it's something backed by consensus and data instead of someone speaking from a position of strongly held but scientifically dubious beliefs. That's the easiest position to defend if someone gets shirty about you not providing them with something that will confirm their biases.

The question of the third grader and the LGBTQ materials has to take into account whether your colleagues, administration, and community are going to back you for doing the correct thing and giving the kid the material they are looking for, because libraries and their materials are supposed to be safe places for children to explore and gain insight into the experiences of others, or whether they will fire you at the first sign of a parent complaint that you did something the parent (or the administrator) didn't like. Because, ethically, the correct thing to do is tell Ron DeSantis (or whichever government officials demanding censorship of your collection and recommendations) and his enablers to fuck off with their censorship nonsense and to increase the amount of aid they send to schools as an apology for wasting everyone's time trying to do things that are forbidden to the government. Practically, if what happens is that on a parent complaint, you get fired, the school gets fined, and you're banned from working in school libraries for two years because a parent complained that their child found a book the parent didn't like, well, not everyone can stand on principle and sit out two years of not working in the profession they're trained in, plus whatever other punishments come in, in the hope that in the next election, they'll be able to vote in someone who rescinds such discriminatory policies.

There may be additional complications coming from whether or not a library worker is allowed to express their opinion on some things. For example, when I'm on the clock, I'm expressly forbidden but state law from offering my opinion about which candidate someone should vote for, or whether any given ballot measure should pass, and that includes the ones that will fund the library system. As public employees, we can provide unbiased information about such things, or look things up on customer request about whether some other group endorsed a candidate or issue, but I have to be very careful not to utter a partisan opinion while representing the library, or that's misuse of taxpayer funds.

If those same entities that are passing terrible legislation are also promising to prosecute those who don't tow the line, it will require some very deep-pocketed entities like the ACLU to represent someone who gets fired in the work termination suit, or to be the person with standing who sues the government on constitutionality grounds or the restriction of the free expression and speech of minors. (Since there is U.S court precedent set that minors do not give up all of their Constitutional protections when they enter school grounds.)

This is where action from state and national organizations would be much more helpful. If someone knows that ALA, for example, will pay their wages until they can find another job somewhere if they're fired because of these forgotten censorship laws, it's much easier to stand on your principles. (It won't happen, because ALA is still very much wedded to ideas about neutrality.)

"It's complicated" is the most accurate answer to give when it comes to information professional ethics and what qualifies as the best source. It's the sort of thing that information professionals are trained on and then given more or less latitude by their organizations to exercise.

[silveradept]

Thanks. I'll keep it in mind.

[silveradept]

That kind of work should have been removed from the collection through normal collection maintenance practices for being old and misleading, and reasonable librarians would have taken your suggestion, had you made it, and removed the thing.

That said, contemporary (02020s) attitudes in libraries are usually about trying to get every book that someone wants to read, as a way of staying relevant to a population they're convinced intended to replace them with Amazon at any moment. 1990s attitudes might get well have been entrenched more in the idea of providing a carefully created collection of acceptable materials rather than letting the commoners make suggestions about what should be there. (Then again, from what little you've told me, those librarians do not sound like they were very good at their work.)