The theme of this thesis is the professional ethics of public librarians. Qualitative interviews have been conducted with fourteen public librarians, with the aim to investigate their thoughts·and opinions concerning professional ethics and their experiences of ethical dilemmas in professional situations. The result shows that the majority of the librarians often discuss problems concerning what's right or wrong but that the discussions are conducted on the basis of practical situations and not in terms of professional ethics. The majority have vague ideas of how the term professional ethics should be applied on the work of public librarians, though all the interviewees consider the professional ethical discussion to be important. We examine the librarians opinions and experiences of ethical dilemmas conceming four subject areas: the principle of the librarian as a neutral and nonrestricting information intermediary, the principle of equal treatment of all the library visitors, difficulties. concerning media selection and the problems based upon the librarians flexibility towards the intemal rules of the library. The librarians experienced the behaviour towards the visitors as the greatest problem. Media selection is also concidered to be a problem area. Neither the role as a neutral intermediary nor the flexibility towards intemal rules creates major ethical dilemmas for the interviewed librarians. The results of our study is put in relation to theories concerning the role of professiona! ethics in the development of a profession.

The aim of this master thesis is to study the relationship between general ethics and professional ethics, to attain an understanding of which values that are given priority in the profession of the librarian regarding personal encounter towards library users. The posed questions are: How can fundamental ethical principles be understood through the view of public librarians? How can policy documents regarding librarian ethics be understood through the view of public librarians? How can policy documents regarding librarian ethics be problematized in relation to fundamental ethical principles? We used four focus groups consisting of public librarians. Three theoretical frameworks create the base of the analysis; four fundamental ethical principles, ethical guidelines for Swedish librarians and recommendations for Swedish librarians in the reference service. Three main issues emerge in the study; equalistic personal encounter where the principle of justice is emphasized but also problematized, library users’ integrity which mainly coincide with the principle of autonomy and finally the librarian’s professional role which are being defined by librarian specific competence to refrain violation of the principle of injury avoidance. The study concludes that the understanding of policy documents deepens when they are being substantialized through general ethics. Through this junction a concretization of general ethics is achieved. Contradictions between different kinds of ethics are also being clarified. This merging clarifies which values that can be given priority in the profession of the librarian. The contradictions emphasize each librarian’s own reflection.

The main purpose of this master thesis is to explore a selection of Swedish librarians view of professional ethics. The latest master thesis written on the subject was published in 1997, which concluded that the Swedish public librarians had a poor awareness concerning professional ethics. We wanted to investigate if something had changed. We interviewed six librarians from five public libraries, asking them questions concerning ethical guidelines, responsibility, censorship and selection, pressure from lobbyists, and ethical problems relating to Internet. The answers we got gave the impression of a divided profession, and the librarian’s awareness of professional ethics can hardly be said to have been improved since 1997. In our conclusion we promote the idea to include ethical theory into the Swedish School of library and information science, to increase the future-to-be librarians ethical awareness. / Uppsatsnivå: D

The purpose of this bachelor's thesis is to investigate how working librariansmanage controversial media. It builds on three debates in the media about libraries and booksthat have taken place during the years of 2012 and 2013. The questiones asked were: How dolibrarians manage racist media? How do librarians manage media that instructs on how tocommit crimes? How do librarians manage sexually explicit media? And lastly, how dolibrarians manage pressure from outside of the library? The theoretical framework consists ofRobert Hauptmans division of the two kinds of ethical strands of librarianship, in this thesiscalled ”Free information” and ”Information responsibly”. The method used to collectempirical material was qualitative interviews. Three librarians were interviewed during themonths of April and May 2013. The librarians studied were all responsible for purchasingadult media. The study showed that librarians, at least the ones studied, were divided in theirethical thinking. On one side they considered free information to be a cornerstone in what thelibrary stood for, but on the other side they all considered there to be media which should notbe offered at their library. However, on one question they all stood firm in their belief:libraries should never remove media from its collection when told to do so by the media or thepublic. This division has been documented in earlier studies.