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Case: 0026

Sector: Public libraries

Porn perusal permitted

Can a librarian refuse to serve a reader?

Summary: A public librarian notices that a visitor to the library is using the public internet terminal to view pornographic websites. The librarian finds this distasteful and refuses to serve the visitor. As a result she is suspended from employment by her employer, though she feels that her actions were ethically justifiable because she was defending the public good.

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: A librarian at a public library notices, one day, that a visitor is sitting quietly at one of the library's internet terminals, surreptitiously viewing pornographic websites. Even though the computer screen on which the visitor is viewing the pornographic material is not obviously visible to other library users, the librarian is both surprised and shocked to see such activity in public. After all, she thinks, this is a public library open to all, so there is a good chance that a child could inadvertently see this material, or that any member of the public could catch a glimpse of such material and be offended. Indeed, the librarian herself is offended at seeing such material and considers it to be highly distasteful. Consequently, she refuses to serve the visitor. She believes that her action is justifiable because she is upholding principles of public decency.

It is probably not unusual for a librarian in any library setting to find one of the readers' personal habits to be distasteful. In this case the librarian's sense of outrage is sufficiently high that she simply cannot tolerate the visitor's habits and so she refuses to serve him.

On the one hand the librarian has acted to defend her personal taste. She believes that pornographic material is improper or distasteful, and she feels offended being in the presence of a person who freely chooses to view it.

On the other hand she believes that she has acted to defend the public good. She believes that a public library is not the place to view pornographic material as vulnerable, impressionable or sensitive people are likely to see the pornographic material and be harmed.

We do not know to what extent the librarian's personal sense of displeasure outweighed her belief in protecting the public. What would she have done had the man (we assume it was a man) been engaged in other activities which might be seen to pose a more immediate threat to the general public or himself, such as writing a terrorist's manual? In Robert Hauptman's seminal study published in 1976 we see that public and academic librarians in the US would continue to serve the patron irrespective of his apparent intention to create an explosive device. There, the sense of protecting the public was outweighed by the librarian's sense of duty to the patron. Personal sensibilities were secondary.

In the present case the librarian is suspended by her employer. They claimed that it was her duty to serve all library users. This represented a direct moral conflict which the librarian could not resolve. She was compelled to obey the command of her employer in being suspended, but not without first having disobeyed her employer's command that all library users must be served.

	Primary	Secondary
Principles	1	6 - 8
Code	D2	B3 - D1 - D3
Related cases

References:

'Professionalism or culpability? an experiment in ethics' by Robert Hauptman in Wilson Library Bulletin; vol. 50 no. 8; 1976; pp. 626-627.

'PATRIOT Games and Patriot Acts, From the President' by Ross Holt in North Carolina Libraries; vol. 61 no. 2; 2003; p. 51.

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