Should Librarians Be Liable?

The freedom to access and create information is the most important ethical consideration of a librarian’s work.  This is true of both public and private librarians.  Democracy depends upon an informed citizenry, which in turn depends upon the freedom of information.  Whether librarians serve the public or a private organization, they should not seek to censor or repress the information that their users seek.

Individual information seekers in a democratic society must be held accountable for their own use of information.  If librarians were liable for the information they help discover, intellectual freedom would be destroyed.  Librarians would withhold information that isn’t necessarily “accurate” to save themselves from being punished in a court of law.  This is true for private as well as public libraries, and would have particularly disastrous effects on research communities.  Even in rigorous research environments, “accurate” information is not always the most valuable information.  New scientific hypotheses, for instance, often disprove the accuracy of previously recorded information.  Rather than worrying about information liability, librarians should be concerned with discovering “more” and “useful” information.  Conflicting viewpoints are necessary to challenge existing hypothesis and promote stronger research.

Conventional wisdom tells librarians that intellectual freedom requires them to be “neutral” conduits for information.  But I don’t believe this to be true, or even possible.  As humans, our flaws and biases prevent us from ever being truly neutral.  Whenever librarians select or recommend information resources, they exercise their personal biases in some small way.  Ethical librarians need to openly acknowledge their biases to information seekers.  If they are honest about who they are and why they recommend certain resources instead of others, their users will be able to make better decisions about how to use the information.

Librarians also need to acknowledge the biases of their users.  In order to provide information seekers with resources that will best fulfill their needs, librarians need to talk to them and try to understand where they are coming from and what they value.  This holds true at an organizational or community-wide level, too.  Librarians who understand their communities well and respond to their communities’ needs will appreciate that some resources, although highly valued in some communities, are actually inappropriate for others.

Once these biases have been acknowledged, both librarian and information seeker are at last free to speak to each other — as one human to another — about the nature and value of the information in question.  Librarians can and should respectfully converse with their users to help them select, interpret and evaluate information.  However, any decision about how to use the information is ultimately the responsibility of the information seeker.  Whether the seeker is a highly trained research specialist or simply a casual amateur, it is nonetheless up to them to critically evaluate the information and decide how they will use it.

Organizations do suffer from information failure at times.  Medical misinformation for a research participant or outdated engineering standards when building aircraft might result in human injury or even death.  When information failures such as these happen, the reasons are complex and can be challenging to assess.  Often it means that many checks and balances failed to catch the mistake.  If an organization is found liable for malpractice in a court of law, then it is the organization’s duty to investigate the cause and to discipline or terminate the responsible parties.  As with any profession, some librarians will at times unfortunately be careless or mistaken in their work.  This is indicative of poor job performance and should be treated as such.  However, a librarian should be liable for malpractice only if true intent to mislead or harm can be proven in a court of law.

Workers in any organization need to understand that librarians do not necessarily endorse information and cannot vouch for its absolute authority; this is the nature of information.  All professionals should be aware that information exchange is a conversation between biased parties, and that they are ultimately responsible for critically evaluating their own resources.  This relationship between librarians and information is necessary to protect the free discourse that is cherished by democratic societies.