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.

This study examined gray areas within professional ethics of a public library organization and investigated the relationship between the library as an organization and the librarian as an employee when it comes to support and opportunities to make exceptions to rules and regulations. This relationship is then related to workplace issues.Data were gathered via interviews with six librarians who were placed into two focus groups. Library organization documents that contain rules and regulations (guidelines) were examined. The presumption was that conformity between librarians’ experiences and actions and the organization’s guidelines will tell us something about workplace conditions. The theoretical framework is derived from the work of Richard M. Hare, a moral philosopher who separates ethics into two levels: intuitive and critical. These levels are used to analyze the data.The main findings are that ethical awareness among the librarians is weak, and there is a tendency to call ethical issues approaches, rather than ethics. There is extensive support from the library organization for making exceptions, especially to ordinary library rules such as lending without a library card. But when it comes to what librarians understand as the most important and difficult task, i.e., ways in which visitors are approached, organizational support is inadequate. For the library organization, there is more to do to make the workplace more satisfying for librarians so that ethical gray areas can be minimized. / Program: Bibliotekarie