Overcoming Today’s Ethical Challenges for Librarians and Vendors (Lively Discussion)

Librarians and information professionals are often faced with situations that require judgment of ethical behavior regarding the library, patrons, and vendor relationships. Librarians encounter conflicts of interest, intellectual freedom issues, privacy concerns, and vendor and publisher relations dilemmas daily. Shrinking and flat budgets and rapidly advancing technology create further challenges to providing high-quality services while practicing ethical behavior. In this session, you will learn some of the ethical challenges that present themselves in librarianship and tactics that can be employed to overcome such challenges. In addition, you will learn how to work and build ethical relationships with vendors, how vendors are held to a high ethical standard, and different ways to evaluate and retain transparency in these relationships.

The session includes a brief presentation followed by breakout groups for a lively discussion on some of the ethical issues we encounter in libraries along with Q&A from the audience.