[Sighfis-l] Information Ethics

[Toni Carbo]

I am pleased to learn of renewed interest in Information Ethics.  ASIS&T
has been actively involved in IE for several years.  Back in 1980 I called
for a Code of Ethics for Information Professionals, only to learn that
ASIS (as it was then known) had had a code for several years. During the
early 1980s ASIS took on the responsibility of discussing the code and
revising it, devoting several conference sessions and articles in its
publications to the topic.  I can provide a bibliography if that is of
interest.

At the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences, we
intorduced an IE lecture series in 1989 and have had a series of excellent
speakers, including Robert Drinan, S.J. ( a professor of Law and faculty
adviser to the Georgetown Journal of legal Ethics and former U.S.
representative from Massachusetts), Jerry Berman (executive director of
the Center for Democracy and Technology),and Rainer Kuhlen (University of
Konstanz) over the years.  In 1990, we
first offered our course on Information Ethics and have continued to teach
this.  We also have IE Fellows, graduate students who work on the course,
the lecture series and maintain the website.  Our IE website, which is
currently undergoing a major revision that will be completed early this
summer, is located at http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~ethics

As a member of the planning committee for the first UNESCO COnference on
Infoethics, I was particulary pleased to see the strong interest around
the world in this important topic.  We published the papers from that
conference in the journal I edit for Academic Press, The International
Information and Library Review.(vol. 29, issue 2, June 1997 and issue 3-4,
Sept-Dec. 1997.  Another conference of note is the annual Ethics of
Electronic Information (EEI) in the 21st Century Conference, held each
year at the University of Memphis (Tennessee).  The papers from the 2000
conference were published in IILR (vol. 32, numbers 3-4, Sept/Dec. 2000).
The proceedings from teh 2001 conference will be published as a separate
volume later this year. I don't have details on the publication, but their
website is www.memphis.edu/ethics21.

I hope to attend the Geneva summit in 2003 and I will be at the ASIS&T
conference in November in Philadelphia.

I am providing all this information because I thought it might be helpful
to others interested in past work on this subject, and because I welcome
comments and suggestions.  I would be very happy to help organize a
session for ASIS&T if there is still time and/or to participate in
discussion on this topic.

I will be teaching IE in January 2003, working on updating the course over
the summer, and I will be a visiting scholar at the Library of Congress
this fall working on IE and Information Policy related to e-government.
Please let me know how I can be of help.

Toni Carbo, Dean and Professor
School of Information Sciences
University of Pittsburgh
505 LIS Building, 135 N. Bellefield Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15260  USA
INTERNET: tcarbo at mail.sis.pitt.edu
FAX     : (412) 624-5231
PHONE   : (412) 624-5139

On Wed, 1 May 2002, Ken Herold wrote:

> I invite this group to begin discussion of questions in the ethics of
> information as part of our participation in the definition and
> recommendation of appropriate standards and controls at the
> international level, specifically in advance of next year's World
> Summit on the Information Society (10 to 12 December 2003) in Geneva.
> Under United Nations auspices and lead by the International
> Telecommunication Union this first phase will seek adoption of a
> Declaration of Principles and Action Plan. One theme identified already
> is “Ethics of the Information Society.” Floridi has previously
> endorsed an extension of ethical concern from the biosphere to the
> infosphere and noted the importance of this historical opportunity for
> collaboration, citing the 21st World Congress of Philosophy: Philosophy
> Facing World Problems (10 to 17 August 2003) in Istanbul. IFLA, the
> International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, has
> been active in past UNESCO sessions on InfoEthics and will certainly
> continue its contributions. Another venue, in the United States, will
> be the 2002 Annual Meeting of ASIST, the American Society for
> Information Science and Technology, on “Knowledge, Connections and
> Community” (18 to 21 November 2002) in Philadelphia. I encourage
> everyone to bookmark these sites:
> www.unesco.org/webworld/
> www.wcp2003.org
> www.itu.int/wsis
>
>
> Ken Herold, Library Systems Manager
> Hamilton College, 198 College Hill Road
> Clinton, NY  13323  315-859-4487
>
>
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