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Case: 0013

Sector: Legal (and other professional services)

Wealthy company resorts to public library resources

Should the information professional condone the use of public libraries to obtain information which is later sold on to a client?

Summary: Junior information professionals in a library/information unit of a financial services consultancy would often make use of a nearby public library when responding to clients’ requests for information. The information professionals, including the Information Manager, wondered whether it was ethical for a relatively wealthy commercial organisation to use the resources of relatively poorly resourced public libraries, and then to sell their information for profit.

The Information Manager was also concerned that use of the public library’s resources would limit access to those resources by other library users, albeit only temporarily. (The junior information professionals empathised with their manager’s concern, as they themselves knew how frustrating it could be to find another person using the directory that they wanted to use.)

NOTE: This Case Study is fictitious. It is informed by experience in the information world, but it does not claim to represent a scenario of actual events or relate to individual people or organisations.

Case Study: The public library contained a number of trade and company directories which the consultancy did not have in its own library. A decision had been made by senior management in earlier years not to hold some expensive directories if they would not often be consulted and if the local public library had them on their shelves. The information taken from these directories would be passed on to the clients as part of a package in the consultancy’s fee-based advisory service. Neither the Information Manager nor his staff could resolve this dilemma which still remains.

In this example the Information Manager has to balance a duty to his employer with a responsibility to society, although a defence of the latter may be difficult if he chooses to condone use of the public library.

On the one hand he may accept that, although he works in a commercial organisation, his responsibility to society takes precedence over his duty to his employer. On this basis he should not condone the use of public libraries for profit at the expense of other public library users.

However, the existence of such useful information resources ‘just around the corner’ may prove too enticing to ignore.

But the Information Manager may only find two arguments supporting continued use of the public library in the interests of society:

In an attempt to alleviate the dilemma, it could be suggested to the information professionals that they consult reference works in the library in full view of the reference librarian and that they retain the books for as short a time as possible. At the very least, they should be aware that this is a genuine dilemma and that it may be of lesser concern to managers. Perhaps solutions can be found locally by information professionals raising the awareness of senior managers to the existence of such dilemmas (which is an obvious interpretation of the CILIP Code section E2).

	Primary	Secondary
Principles	1	-
Code	D1	B7 – B8 – C1 – C8 – D2 - E2
Related cases	-

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