Ethics and Librarianship (review)

You still can't judge a book by its cover. The cover of Ethics and Librarianshipis very, very nice.

Robert Hauptman's book is intended to be a broad-based, comprehensive overview of ethics and librarianship, but if you're at all interested in any of the topics addressed here, you already know everything that this book will tell you. A good nonfiction work should either challenge readers about subjects they already know or inform them about things they don't. Lacking either of those qualities, a good book will at least portray the subject in a new and unique way. Ethics and Librarianship does none of that.

Still, the book would be an interesting sociological study if only half of Hauptman's claims (most, including these samples, are uncited) were true: "For example, everyone takes pencils home from work or embezzles a few pennies now and again or picks up a television or small refrigerator from the rubble during a natural disaster" (6). "It is mooted that three quarters of all theft in libraries is perpetrated by employees" (43). "[T]eenage military personnel control our fate" (58). "Sometimes even animals act perversely just to mess up an experiment" (96).

These, sadly, are among the most credible of his claims; his section on special libraries deserves its own separate review. (Here is a representative sentence from pages 74-75: "In order to protect themselves from this sobering possibility [of losing clients], [lawyers] have passed laws that make it illegal to tender legal advice without a license, which obviously makes it impossible for a layperson to explain some intricate aspect of the law to an unsophisticated, indigent, illiterate, or deranged patron." It would take less time to explain what is right in this sentence than what is wrong.)

Anyone who finishes this book might well be scared of ever setting foot in a library again. Hauptman describes student workers as cowards when facing library emergencies (examples of which are "altercations, heart attacks, severe sickness, and lunacy") and libraries as needing special protection "because they often house hundreds or even thousands of strangers who may be anxious or inebriated" (53). In case you had not gotten the point, he goes on to state that anyone can wander into libraries, including "the homeless, the dishonest, and the psychotic" (53). He actually implies that some reference librarians, if left to their own devices, would "harm patrons" (62). And the future of libraries is little better; he suggests that one day in the near future patrons will be scanned or probed (54).

If Hauptman's view of libraries is bleak, his view of constitutional law is borderline criminal. He claims that any proscription of speech is unconstitutional (then allows for one exception that isn't an exception at all) (18). But any first-year law student knows that many time, place, and manner restrictions are perfectly within the bounds of the First Amendment. The problem with just about everything he writes on this subject is that a reader who doesn't know better might erroneously think that the things Hauptman claims are and are not constitutional actually are and are not constitutional.

Scattered throughout he writes sentences that are self-contradicting (e.g., "The use of misleading, obfuscating, or offensive terminology is indeed deplorable, and the primary ethical challenge in cataloging is the extirpation" [47], "they must react immediately and proactively" [90], and, from page 103, a page without a single citation, "Citations are the lifeblood of scholarship"). Some sentences beg repeated reading, and not in the good sense (e.g., "Access is encouraged or proscribed in accordance with the theoretical foundations that undergird librarianship" [51], and "Sentience and knowledge are concomitants" [120]). He often uses words that suggest he wrote the book to confuse instead of clarify (e.g., "pilpul," "etiology," "lagniappes," "apodictic," "casuistic," "armamentarium," "teratisms," "otiose," "pusillanimous," "antipodal").

If you are at all concerned with budgetary...