Ala Code of Ethics

In today’s world, individuals can make a single decision that can have a positive or negative effect on their family, coworkers, friends, or on the entire world. However, the life we lead can reflect our personal character. Therefore, personal ethics are different for each one of us. However, when we work in a professional career, we have our own work character to reflect on. What is professional ethics? “Professional ethics concerns the moral issues that arise because of the specialist knowledge that professionals attain, and how the use of this knowledge should be governed when providing a service to the public” (Chadwick 1998). Today, Librarianship is a profession that has a code of professional ethics to help us to behave a certain way or to follow specific way and to follow code of conducts. For example, “as librarians, we library specialists are called upon to make decisions every day. Those decisions chart the course for that particular day and the future, for ourselves and for those we work with. Making the right decisions makes our corner of the world a better place” (Baxter 2008, 27). Therefore, as we recognize how important it is to have a code of ethics, the library associations have a long history of creation and development of ethics for our profession.
American Library Association (ALA) Code of Ethics History American Library Association (ALA) first discussed code of ethics between 1903 and 1909. Mary Wright Plummer and Charles Knowles Bolton contributed most to the early Code of Ethics. During that time, Mary Wright Plummer was a director of the Pratt Institute Library School and Charles Knowles Bolton was a librarian of the Boston Athenaeum. The Suggested Code of Ethics was released to ALA members in 1930. Its introduction stated: “The library as an institution exists for the benefits of a give constituency. This may be the nation, a state, a county, a municipality, a school or college, a special field of research…, or some more

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