ethical aspects of digital libraries

Ethical Aspects of Digital Libraries

Rafael Capurro

FH Stuttgart

University of Applied Sciences

1999

Contents

Introduction

I. Digital Libraries as an Ethical Challenge

II. From Interface Design to Interspace Design

Conclusion

Introduction

• The rise of Information Ethics as a major discipline within LIS

• UNESCO: – Virtual Forum – 2nd International Congress on Ethical, Legal

and Societal Challenges of Cyberspace 1988

Introduction

• What are the consequences of digital libraries with regard to local and global cultures?

• What are the challenges with regard to human rights?

• Who is responsible for what concern(s)?

• What is the impact of ethical thinking on such concerns?

I. DL as an Ethical Challenge

Ethical Aspects of DL at the:

• ASIS Annual Conference 1997

• ASIS Annual Conference 1999

• Journal of Global Information Management

• Digital Libraries Program

I. DL as an Ethical Challenge

• In a global environment, local regulations are a weak tool for shaping human action

• Freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of access become simultaneous rights

• Are DL taking us a step further towards the achievement of UDHR, Art. 19?

II. From interface design to interspace design

• Digital libraries are located in the kind of global space we call cyberspace

• What is space?– Life-space and metrical space– The network of relationships and the possibility

to “dis-tance” other beings– The Cartesian viewpoint of knowledge in itself

II. From interface...

• What happens with distances in cyberspace?– Our bodily distances to things

– Eliminating distances to digital things: bringing them to the same place, i.e. to the interface

– Ethos as habit and way of dwelling (Latin: habitare)

– Culture as creating common living places through customs


• Haunting:– what we usually do; the place we usually go to

– a kind of ghostly feeling or haunting experience

• Through the interface, cyberspace becomes a part of our life-space

• When do we feel at home in a DL?– when devices become transparent

– when they become part of a worldly structure of public interrelations or local life-spaces

II. From interface

• Spatiality in the Internet– We can do things with words (actio digitalis in

distans) (differences with regard to: oral speech and printing)

• Real devices and cyber devices (McHoul): spectral environments

• The digital as a kind of overlap between the real and the cyber (or spectral)


• The ethical question:– how do we manage to bring DL existentially

near to people?– who will use them and who not and why?

• What we should do: – the construction of the interface– the construction of the interspace (Winograd)


• How do we manage to bring DL close(r) to people?

• How do people manage by themselves to bring DL near to themselves?

• How do we learn to become citizens of cyberspace?


UNESCO recommendations:• bring net access to poor countries• support the development of a World

Information Ethos• support concrete projets in information poor

countries• prommote public awareness on these matters


• provide permanent, specific, and detailed knowledge of existing information activities in information poor countries

• promote the rights of non-English-speaking-countries

• promote topics in information ethics to be included in curricula

• promote grassroots efforts through international organizations


Other ideas:• establishment of free nets• installation of terminals in public life-spaces• developing an ethics of care with regard to DL:

integrating digital space within the life-space, particularly within the network of paper libraries

• ethical indicatives: recomendations open to revisions


• UNESCO’s Observatory of the Inf. Society

• Two critial roles of libraries in a modern society (Nancy John):– the access role– the preservation role

Conclusion

• The ethical problems of DL are of both a global and a local nature

• The question of inequality of access due to various kinds of constraints is a major ethical and legal issue along with

• The question of knowledge preservation and its transmission to future generations.

Conclusion

• I have considered the question of access as a spatial problem, i.e. as a problem of integrating cyberspace into life-space:– How to create a culture of sharing and

preserving digital knowledge?– How do we manage to bring DL existentially

closer to people?

Conclusion

• DL should be considered under the democratic premise of basic information provision

• The question of interface design should be considered also as a question of democratic interspace design

Conclusion

The ethical imperative for DL:

“Manage knowledge and information in order to reduce inequity of access and support cultural diversity”

and its translation into ethical indicatives: it is not possible to decide a priori how this medium should be integrated within existing media environments (legal, economic and political constraints, and moral milieus).

ethical aspects of digital libraries

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