Introduction
Ethics in a broad sense - i.e.
as a discipline that includes individual ethics, politics and economics
and which was called by his founder, Aristotle (384-322 BC), practical
philosophy - is concerned with critical thinking on social structures
and traditions that shape the lives of individuals and societies. It aims
at questioning moral biases and at opening new choices. Information ethics
as a descriptive theory explores the power structures influencing
attitudes towards information and traditions in different cultures and
epochs. Information ethics as an emancipatory theory develops criticisms
of moral attitudes and traditions in the information field at an individual
and collective level. It includes normative aspects.
Both aspects, exploration
and evaluation, belong together. Information ethics explores and evaluates:
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the development of moral values
in the information field,
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the creation of new power structures
in the information field,
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information myths,
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hidden contradictions and intentionalities
in information theories and practices,
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the development of ethical conflicts
in the information field.
The study of information ethics
within different social traditions is an open task. In the Western tradition
information ethics has its roots in the oral culture of ancient Greece.
Agora (marketplace and meeting place) and freedom of speech (Greek:
parrhesia) were essential to Athenian democracy. The cynics cultivated
freedom of speech as a special form of expression. Socrates (469-399 BC)
practiced his thinking in public places and never published his arguments
in a written form. Plato (427-347 BC) discusses in his dialogues the transition
from an oral to a written culture. Under the influence of Christianity
a book culture was developed which was mainly centered on one book,
namely the Bible. The invention of printing by Gutenberg in 1455 and the
Reformation, which profited from it, brought back, in the Modern period,
the idea of freedom of communication, which implied the freedom of communicating
ideas to others not just in a written but in a printed form. The French
Revolution brought about the transformation of the private libraries owned
by nobility as well as by the church into common property. Projects like
the one of the French Encyclopédie and the public access
to libraries created a new awareness of freedom of information which culminated
in the principle of freedom of the press as one of the foundations of modern
democracies. The Western tradition of information ethics from ancient Greece
until the beginning of the 20th century is characterized by two ideas,
namely freedom of speech and freedom of printed works, particularly
freedom of the press. A third ethical challenge arises now in a
networked world, namely freedom of access.
A basis for ethical thinking
in the information field are the following articles of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR):
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Respect for the dignity of human
beings (Art. 1),
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Confidentiality (Art. 1, 2,
3, 6),
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Equality of opportunity (Art.
2, 7),
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Privacy (Art. 3, 12),
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Right to freedom of opinion
and expression (Art. 19),
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Right to participate in the
cultural life of the community (Art. 27),
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Right to the protection of the
moral and material interests concerning any scientific, literary or artistic
production (Art. 27).
Electronic information is based
on information and communication technologies (ICT) such as: personal computers,
laptops, interactive devices: e-mail, chat, mailing lists, teleconferencing,
servers, multimedia devices, search engines, integration of old
media (TV, radio, telephone) into new media (Internet), mobile access
to the Internet.
The massive diffusion of
ICT causes radical changes in public and private institutions in general
as well as in national and international information and communication
policies in particular. This may concern:
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the creation of specialized
(regional) knowledge markets
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the development of (national
and/or regional) digital libraries and archives
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the development of electronic
commerce
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the publication and diffusion
of scientific knowledge through the Internet
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the creation of services for
public access to the Internet
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the creation of educational
services based on ICT (at different levels: schools, universities, research)
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the promotion of local cultures
in the digital medium
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the development of communities
and interest groups, independently of geographic boundaries
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the participation of individuals
and groups in the political (communal, regional, national, international)
processes.
There are several kinds of barriers
that may cause the exclusion of users from the benefits of the new technology
such as:
-
technical barriers: energy,
telephone, servers, hardware and software
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economic barriers: costs of
acquisition, use and updating
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cultural barriers: information
illiteracy (Bawden 2001), biases, dominance of English.
Justice and fairness in the
information field - following the contractarian approach to ethics
- concern the creation of a social information and communication economy
as the core of a social market economy. In other words, digital capitalism
should be ethically seen as a challenge to creating (legal) conditions
in order to surmount the so called digital divide (US Department
of Commerce 1999). Public libraries may play a key role allowing free access
to the Internet to persons that for different reasons cannot use ICT but
are dependent of these kind of devices for shaping their lives. Libraries
can become an agent of social change - following the ethics of care
approach -, promoting educational, social, and economic activities at all
levels of a society. This is the perspective within which I ask the ethical
question concerning the creation and use of digital libraries (Capurro
2000).
I. Ethical Challenges
of Digital Libraries
Production, collection, classification
and dissemination of digitized knowledge and information give rise to ethical
challenges such as: How can a democratic right of access to knowledge be
guaranteed? Creating digital libraries may be an answer to this question,
but how do they merge into existing traditional libraries? What kind of
public services should they offer? What kind of digital collections should
they create? How is the integrity and sustainability of these collections
economically, technically and culturally guaranteed? Who are the de
facto beneficiaries of these value-added services?
Let us start with the last
question. Some of the value-added characteristics of digital libraries
are:
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access to documents independently
of time and space: think, for instance, about the problem of access to
documents stored in libraries and archives far away from the place where
these documents are needed,
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combination of documents of
different types in different (digital and/or classic) archives
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search for documents and non-digital
information on the basis of search engines and online catalogs,
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combination of information and
communication processes
Key technical and organizational
problems related to the creation of digital libraries concern:
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Formats (such as pdf, HTML or
gif)
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Content (special collections)
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Sustainability (preservation
of the digital material; surrogates for originals that are in a fragile
condition)
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Copyright (producers, institutions,
users)
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Fair use
-
Financing
-
Cataloging
-
Search capabilities
Information specialists must
be educated in order to design and maintain digital libraries. They must
be able to structure, represent and update all kinds of information in
different media (Lesk 1997, Borgman 2000).
Ethical questions concerning
collection and classification of information refer to censorship
and control. The answers to these questions vary historically according
to the interests of political, economic, religious and military powers.
Cultural and moral traditions play also an important role concerning, for
example, what is considered as offensive. The main ethical question in
this area may be formulated as follows: Are there limits to intellectual
freedom? The will to exclude 'bad' information is itself an ethical paradox
as far as any exclusion that would limit intellectual freedom should be
avoided. There is a tendency in liberal societies to less control. But
this leads to ethical as well as moral and legal conflicts (Froehlich 1997,
Frické/Mathiesen/Fallis 2000).
The particular protection
of the intellectual property is one of the most important and difficult
ethical, moral and legal questions in the information field particularly.
Different moral and legal traditions have lead to different protective
laws in different regions of the world. The European tradition emphasizes
the moral rights of the authors (droit d'auteur). These are related
to the person of the author and concern the integrity and authorship of
her/his work as well as her/his reputation. The Anglo-American tradition
emphasizes the property or economic rights (copyright). Conflicts arise
when national and international laws and moral traditions protect different
aspects of various media. Ways of harmonization are the Berne Convention
(1886, revisions) and the Universal Copyright Convention (1952)
(UCC). Both treaties are administrated by the World Intellectual Property
Organization (WIPO). Digitizing makes copying and re-making easier.
Internationalization via the Internet changes the dimension and prospective
of national legislation and control. This new situation gives rise to questions
such as:
-
Should information always be
regarded as a property?
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Should the notion of knowledge-sharing
become predominant with regard to the notion of ownership?
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How can the public access to
electronic information be guaranteed?
These questions must be carefully
analyzed when creating digital libraries in order to protect the interests
of producers, mediators and users.
Ethical questions concerning
information dissemination are related to problems of public access
and reference/brokerage services. The question of access can be studied
as an individual as well as a societal issue. Individuals and societies
are interested in free and equal access to information. At the same time
it must be acknowledged that information is a product of work and has an
economic value that should be protected. The question is then, What information
for whom should be free. The problem of user education is also connected
to this question. The question of access as a societal issue concerns the
problem of creating equal opportunities of access avoiding the gap between
the information rich and the information poor (digital divide).
It is controversial how far the discourse on the digital divide may lead
to a (theoretical and practical) confusion between what can be seen as
a societal need or as a (human) right. The last assertion would eventually
expand government power and legitimate its control and ruling activities
(Foster 2000). With regard to reference/brokerage services ethical conflicts
may arise regarding, for example, the right to confidentiality. Organizations
may ask information professionals to break confidentiality. Information
professionals are supposed to inform their users about the limits of their
sources and methods. Finally there is the question of misinformation (or
information malpractice) that can cause great (economic) damages to the
users.
II. Public
Libraries and Digital Libraries
Let us now turn to the question
about how digital libraries can merge into existing traditional public
libraries and what could be the prospects of this process. Public libraries
can be conceived as information centers, as education centers and as communication
centers (Hernández Sánchez 2000). A digital culture focused
on what has been called information literacy (Bawden 2001) may affect
their services as follows:
1) Public libraries as information centers:
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Online catalogs at national
and regional levels
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Production and access to their
own digital (multimedia) documents, particularly to special collections
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Digital information services
in cultural, social and governmental areas
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Development of intranets for
specific purposes.
2) Public libraries as education centers:
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Training users in order to get
information from the network (particularly in case of users engaged in
the educational field)
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Training users in order to use
the network for personal communication purposes. This may include the creation
of personal web sites and/or the use of e-mail.
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Training users in order to use
the network work for social communication purposes such as creating user
groups.
3) Public libraries as communication centers:
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Taking care of users, their
information, interests and ideas
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Providing individual communication
services (e-mail, forum, chat)
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Providing social communication
services at the local level (town, city, region) and national level.
These value-added services imply
the modernization of traditional equipment as well as a program of information
literacy. The content of digital library projects may be oriented towards
the preservation and use of local cultural heritage as well as to projects
related to social and industry related fields. These projects may be conceived
as joint ventures in order to create new sources of work and support
local industry (See Annex).
A digital culture
does not mean that, say, the culture of the book will disappear. Different
media having different qualities do not replace each other, although
they may displace their use for specific purposes. Thus, oral culture
did not disappear with the invention of writing or with the massive diffusion
of printed works. Today we are particularly aware that virtual communities
and distance learning make more evident the specific value of meeting people
face-to-face.
Digital libraries within
public library services can be considered not only as an important cultural
and social service but also as a support for a growing information economy,
their creation being supported by a utilitarian ethics, with its
maxim of improving welfare independently of the degree and the ways of
using digital information, economic growth is basically knowledge dependent.
Intellectual capital, either externalized in any kind of artificial media,
or, which is a crucial aspect, tacit in the heads of people, is a key aspect
for economic and social development. And vice versa: companies have
a social responsibility and should not see themselves exclusively from
the shareholder point of view. A culture of corporate citizenship
should be based on mutual information sharing. This by no means excludes
legitimate interests of information protection (patents, licences, customer
information, proprietary knowledge, know-how, etc.) as it is also the case
of the protection of personal data by individual users or, more generally,
of any kind of copyright protected product.
Conclusion
A prudent national and regional
information policy must create, on the one hand, the technical and social
conditions in order to meet the challenge of digital capitalism, i.e. to
actively help the individuals and groups, particularly those who are already
marginalized. A way to do this is to promote grass-roots projects in order
to help people develop their own ideas and projects and to build socially
and economically a self-supported existence. This finally can only done
through educational efforts, from which not only the industry but the society
as a whole may profit. Information professionals, on the other hand, should
learn through dialogue and mutual criticism:
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How to recognize and articulate
ethical conflicts in the information field.
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To activate their sense of responsibility
with regard to the consequences of individual and collective interactions
in the information field.
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To improve their qualification
for intercultural dialogue on the basis of the recognition of different
kinds of information cultures and values.
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Basic ethical theories and concepts
and their relevance in everyday information work.
The International
Center for Information Ethics (ICIE) offers a forum for information
and communication about questions (ICIE 2001).
Digital libraries ? what
for? We should not rely too quickly on a moral answer like 'for
the sake of democracy and general welfare', not only because digital libraries
are not an end in themselves but also because a one-sided view ? I call
it informatism ? makes us blind to the real needs. Disconnecting
the discourse on digital libraries from the traditional library community
creates another kind of divide that narrows the view for instance with
regard to the question of preservation.
David Levy summarizes the
question of the purpose of digital libraries as follows:
"Libraries, digital or
otherwise, carry a strong symbolic charge. On the face of it, they are
just one element in the larger circuit through which information travels
from production to ultimate consumption. In this respect, they are on a
par with the other elements in the circuit: authors, publishers, distributors
and communities of users. But libraries have to come to symbolize and to
exemplify the values we impute to the entire circuit. What we say about
digital libraries and how we understand them embodies and signals our attitude
toward the place of information in our culture. To this extent, it is potentially
of great consequence not only how we construct digital libraries but how
we talk about them and whom we include in the conversation.
"Would you tell me, please,
which way I ought to go from here?" Alice asks the Cheshire Cat. "That
depends a good deal on where you want to get to," the Cat replies. "I don't
much care where-" Alice says. "Then it doesn't matter which way you go,"
the Cat replies. "-so long as I get somewhere," Alice adds. "Oh, you're
sure to do that," says the Cat, "if you only walk long enough." Here is
where the parallel between Alice in Wonderland and digital libraries ends.
For those of us involved in digital library research and development care
very much about where we're trying to get to. Whether, or however, we articulate
it, most of us are greatly concerned with the societal consequences of
the work we do. It is my belief that more explicit attention to this direction
- and a broader, more inclusive debate about it - will lead to a stronger
and more focused research agenda." (Levy 2000)
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