The ethical question in the performance of the librarian professional

Abstract

The development and the dissemination of new tecnologies related to information has caused immense social transformations, giving rise to the environment called information society. From this context one can extract elements which makes possible an ethical reflection about the requirement of new mind models and, consequently, new practices. These elements are the imperatives of speed and flexibility that modify the way people live. The approach aims to indicate that the requirement for speed and flexibility compromise an ethics taken under the perpective of formation of the character, and identify that a major influence from the news socials configurations from the analyzed imperatives falls upon sphere of the work. In this sphere one of the most affected areas is relates to the information, environment where the librarian professionals acts. In this way, one asks about some premise of the information society, in view of the know-how and reason to make of the librarian professional, evaluating under wich aspects his performance is based on ethics and what it means in an unstable context where the dissolution of the values and the flexibility of knowing are the fundamentals standards. The reflections converge to the confrontation between the definition of ethics as formation of the character and the Librarian’s Code of the Professional Ethics, concluding that, in case of to analyzing attitudes incompatible with the profession’s dignity, would be more appropriated a Commission of Ethic constituted to evaluate actions that apparently don’t fit in a Code of Professional Conduct than a Code of Ethics with prescriptions to fix conduct norms.