Walker Brown

I take a deontological approach to ethics, that is to say I tend to see ethics in terms of duties that one is required to carry out, for example theft is wrong because one has a duty not to take the possession of the items of another without prior consent. Granted duty isn’t the be all end all duty arises from the rights of individuals but for the purpose of speaking about the proper actions of a professional what rights need to be upheld are less important than the duties that they correspond to, if a chef serves you under-cooked chicken our focus is not on the chef violating your right to not have health put in jeopardy but rather on the chef failing his duty to properly prepare his customers dishes. The primary duty of information professionals is the duty to provide access to information or to put it in other words the core of what information professionals do is allow users to retrieve information. From this primary duty the other secondary duties of information professionals derive.   

We have a duty to preserve information so that users may be able to later access that information, we have a duty to provide good customer service to insure that users are able to effectively find information, etc. etc. Now then the primary duty is not without its limits, like all duties there is an unsaid “within reason” following it, we have a duty not to harm another person “within reason” if some is attacking you then you are not doing anything immoral by defending yourself forcefully, so long as it is not excessive. Likewise when it comes to providing information we must do so to a degree “within reason” if a user is seeking information on how to build an explosive then we are not failing in our duties as information professionals by turning them away rather we are simply not following an unreasonable extension of our primary duty.

On top of that not all types of access are the same while most people think of academic purposes for accessing archives many instead access archives for commercial reasons. When the catalog for a collection is created we must at least attempt to provide enough information to cover the most common information searched by users. As such one of the cornerstones of archival work should be determining and providing the type of access based off of the users desires. Titles, Author Names, and Date of Creation are at the very least the minimum that we need to include when cataloging items in our databases.

One of conditions that gives access its importance is its use in education many academic fields as well as lower levels of education rely on the continued existence of the items within our collections. As such hand in hand with access we also have a duty to preserve what items we can. This is however opposed by the reality of the of the scarcity of space and funds and so we are forced to try and figure out what items will be useful to future users. With both of these principles building the foundation for our duty to preserve we must walk a tightrope between preserving what others want and what we think will be important.

Copyright Law as it currently stands is too restrictive and long lasting for any positive impact. Copyright Law must be built upon moral justifications of protecting the author's position as the creator of the work. By returning to a system of short initial copyright terms with the possibility to be renewed we may alleviate many of the worries with the currently lengthy copyright terms by allowing for works that have a short shelf life to be able to lapse into the public domain. The other major thing that must be done is the removal of the DMCA for a system that fits our modern internet-connected reality and does not put the burden of proof on those suspected of copyright infringement.