The main purpose of this master thesis is to explore a selection of Swedish librarians view of professional ethics. The latest master thesis written on the subject was published in 1997, which concluded that the Swedish public librarians had a poor awareness concerning professional ethics. We wanted to investigate if something had changed. We interviewed six librarians from five public libraries, asking them questions concerning ethical guidelines, responsibility, censorship and selection, pressure from lobbyists, and ethical problems relating to Internet. The answers we got gave the impression of a divided profession, and the librarian?s awareness of professional ethics can hardly be said to have been improved since 1997.

The purpose of this bachelor's thesis is to investigate how working librariansmanage controversial media. It builds on three debates in the media about libraries and booksthat have taken place during the years of 2012 and 2013. The questiones asked were: How dolibrarians manage racist media? How do librarians manage media that instructs on how tocommit crimes? How do librarians manage sexually explicit media? And lastly, how dolibrarians manage pressure from outside of the library? The theoretical framework consists ofRobert Hauptmans division of the two kinds of ethical strands of librarianship, in this thesiscalled ?Free information? and ?Information responsibly?. The method used to collectempirical material was qualitative interviews.

The theme of this thesis is the professional ethics of public librarians. Qualitative interviews have been conducted with fourteen public librarians, with the aim to investigate their thoughts·and opinions concerning professional ethics and their experiences of ethical dilemmas in professional situations.The result shows that the majority of the librarians often discuss problems concerning what's right or wrong but that the discussions are conducted on the basis of practical situations and not in terms of professional ethics. The majority have vague ideas of how the term professional ethics should be applied on the work of public librarians, though all the interviewees consider the professional ethical discussion to be important.We examine the librarians opinions and experiences of ethical dilemmas conceming four subject areas: the principle of the librarian as a neutral and nonrestricting information intermediary, the principle of equal treatment of all the library visitors, difficulties. concerning media selection and the problems based upon the librarians flexibility towards the intemal rules of the library. The librarians experienced the behaviour towards the visitors as the greatest problem.

The aim of this master thesis is to study the relationship between general ethics and professional ethics, to attain an understanding of which values that are given priority in the profession of the librarian regarding personal encounter towards library users. The posed questions are: How can fundamental ethical principles be understood through the view of public librarians? How can policy documents regarding librarian ethics be understood through the view of public librarians? How can policy documents regarding librarian ethics be problematized in relation to fundamental ethical principles? We used four focus groups consisting of public librarians. Three theoretical frameworks create the base of the analysis; four fundamental ethical principles, ethical guidelines for Swedish librarians and recommendations for Swedish librarians in the reference service. Three main issues emerge in the study; equalistic personal encounter where the principle of justice is emphasized but also problematized, library users? integrity which mainly coincide with the principle of autonomy and finally the librarian?s professional role which are being defined by librarian specific competence to refrain violation of the principle of injury avoidance.