There are many fields of practice where professionals in that field make a vow, take an oath, give an affirmation, or make a promise, swearing to uphold the profession’s duty, ethics, and service. Doctors have the Hippocratic Oath, attorneys have the Oath on Admission, elected officials have an Oath of Office, and military personnel take an oath on enlistment.

Librarians do the same, even when unspoken. The ALA introduces its code of ethics with the following:

“As members of the American Library Association, we recognize the importance of codifying and making known to the profession and to the general public the ethical principles that guide the work of librarians, other professionals providing information services, library trustees, and library staffs…We have a special obligation to ensure the free flow of information and ideas to present and future generations.”

See? It says right there. The free flow of information. We aren’t in the business of closing the doors, putting up the gates, or siphoning details from the information to which we connect our users. We don’t. Well, I didn’t think we did because we aren’t supposed to.

Well, now I’m seeing it happen. Librarians (or are they?) charged with caring for that connection on behalf of ten. million. people. are willfully and intentionally removing information that makes the connection worthwhile, useful, functional, inspiring, and leading to informed citizens.

Potentially, it’s a cop-out to avoid earning their pay–it takes longer to correct and improve messy information than it does to delete it so that no one can see the mess.

That does quite the opposite of what they think. It makes people not want to come over and learn more. It makes people look elsewhere for that information. It keeps them from running up our gate counts and catalog uses. It puts the money we would get from our justified existence in the pockets of corporations that could do with less. And then they complain that we’ve lost our user base to such corporations and try to replicate their facades. Then they complain that they don’t get enough hits on their websites and searches in their catalogs. And instead of filling those places with more information to draw users in by being a fount of reliability and completeness, they remove it. They delete it. And they tell you it’s an improvement.

They’ve lost their way. They are holding us back. And they are proud of themselves. And we’ve let it happen to us.

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Disclaimer:
All words and images are my own. If they are not, they are cited as such to give proper attribution to the intellectual property owners.
No words or images reflect the opinions or viewpoints of my current, former, or future employers and educational institutions. They are from my own viewpoint.