Library catalog notes for "bad books": Ethics vs. responsibilities

Abstract

The conflict between librarians' ethics and their responsibilities in the process of progressive collection management, which applies the principles of cost accounting to libraries, to call attention to the "bad books" in their collections that are compromised by age, error, abridgement, expurgation, plagiarism, copyright violation, libel, or fraud, is discussed. According to Charles Cutter, notes in catalog records should call attention to the best books but ignore the bad ones. Libraries that can afford to keep their "bad books," however, which often have a valuable second life, must call attention to their intellectual contexts in notes in the catalog records. Michael Bellesiles's Arming America, the most famous case of academic fraud at the turn of the twenty-first century, is used as a test case. Given the bias of content enhancement that automatically pulls content from the Web into library catalogs, catalog notes for "bad books" may be the only way for librarians to uphold their ethical principles regarding collection management while fulfilling their professional responsibilities to their users in calling attention to their "bad books.".