A. Articulate the Principles of Intellectual Freedom

Introduction to Core Competency A: Articulate the ethics, values and foundational principles of library and information professionals and their role in the promotion of intellectual freedom.

A major aspect of intellectual freedom is freedom from economic censorship. For the first six months, my article on the Open Access Initiative (OAI), published in ITAL, was available only through proprietary databases. Today, 1.5 years after publication, it is available to download at the ITAL Website by anyone with access to the Internet, in addition to being available through proprietary databases. In that first six months, I received several email messages from people in developing nations asking for copies of the article, which I happily sent them. These people did not have access to this article because their libraries did not subscribe to the proprietary databases probably because they could not afford the fees. This is a form of economic censorship.

My paper argues that OA archives and journals encourage intellectual freedom and scholarship by removing access restrictions created by fee-based dissemination. With OA the same knowledge and information that is available to first world scholars is available third world scholars, as long as Internet access is available. I argue that OA signifies the democratization of knowledge and supports a socially responsible way to distribute knowledge. OA is evidence of growing desires, worldwide, for an equitable and democratic distribution of information resources between have and have-not nations.

I joined the etd-1 Discussion List, a listserve on ETDs that started in 1997. I recently learned that starting this spring UMI ProQuest will institute an Open Access publishing option for dissertations and theses, in addition to their traditional publishing option. For an additional fee, graduate students can choose to publish in PQDT Open, a new ProQuest online repository of Open Access graduate works. Publishing in PQDT Open will enable anyone with a connection to the Internet to access this database and download manuscripts.

The question is who will pay the additional $95 and what are you getting for it? At some institutions, students have to pay, at others the library picks up the costs. One institution, University of Hong Kong, has 12,000 full text theses in their ETD repository. David Palmer, a library administrator, remarks "Should we pay US $1,140,000 to UMI for OA? Or advise our users to search [for citations] on PQDT and then again on HKU [the local ETD repository]?" His numbers alone argue persuasively in favor of institutional ETD repositories. Not all universities have ETD repositories, argues the ProQuest representative in the same thread. And "for those that do not, the free institutional access... to the digital version of their graduates' dissertations/theses is a tremendous value."

I continue the discussion in an article on ETD repositories. This article argues that ETDs benefit students and universities by enhancing graduate education, expanding graduate research, increasing a university's visibility, and instructing students, faculty, administration, and librarians about digital technology. University libraries that establish ETD repositories are moving beyond a custodial role to contributing actively to the evolution of scholarly communication and the promotion of intellectual freedom. Because this article is currently being considered elsewhere for publication, I am submitting here an earlier, less complete, version.

Archivists as preservers of societal intellectual records play a role equal to librarians regarding promoting intellectual freedom. In Two Theories of Appraisal: Cook and Duranti, I analyze two opposing theories of appraisal. Archives exist in order to establish for posterity an image of society of as it really is but not necessarily as conceived of by those producing the records. Archival appraisal is done in order to determine which institutional activities create records that provide a true image of society. These are the records then that get preserved permanently in the archives. For Cook, the role of the archivist is not to preserve the whole of the records, but include appraisal with the goal of finding those "hot spots" where the image of society is the most "direct," appraisal, not of the records themselves, but the context in which the records are created.

For my 256 Archives and Manuscripts Final Project, I applied Cook's appraisal model to self-archiving institutional repositories (IRs), of which ETD repositories are a subset. To prove that institutional repositories are true archives in the traditional, Jenkinsonian sense of the term, and not merely called archives, as are many electronic records that are no longer current, I ask, "Do IRs exhibit the characteristics of archives, have permanent value, and show a clear image of society?"

I use the concepts of archives as evidence to argue that self-archiving institutional repositories exhibit characteristics of citizen-state interaction making them potentially "hot spots" or highly relevant archives where the image of society is most direct. For the purposes of this argument the state equals the intellectual community in general. Citizens self-archive directly into repositories without involving commercial interests embodied in commercially published journals-powerful, existing societal structures. Therefore, institutional repositories and their records are created in contexts involving conflicting elements of society, and provide a better image of society to future generations. By extension, institutional repositories qualify as true archives that have permanent value and are worth preserving.

In an essay, Are Librarians Keepers of America's Culture?, I discuss the socially constructed role of librarians as keepers of society's culture. I argue that the traditional role of guardians or keepers of our culture has shifted to that of purveyors of information. I argue that the public library is still the great social equalizer, because the public library provides free Internet access in communities all over the country, communities where the public library may be the only place in town with a high speed Internet link. This essay won the 2004 William B. Neff Award offered by the Museum, Arts, and Humanities Division (MAHD) of the Special Library Association (SLA).