John M. Budd (1) (1953–)

I tried to like this book, but it turns out to be mostly a heavy theoretical treatise. The first chapter is a historical overview of libraries from the dawn of time to the 20th century. It is pretty dry reading. The other chapters are not that much better. Maybe for me, in large measure, the book did not work because much of what is in the book I have read in various forms in other sources, especially during library school. Instead of providing a true self-reflection of the profession (what show more I expected), the book got bogged down with a lot of theory, old history, and philosophizing. I was interested in the ethics chapter, but I think there are better places to read in order to consider the ethics of our profession. As a practicing librarian, this is one book about the profession to skip, unless you happen to like dense reading. show less

I prefered this book to other textbooks on library management because it actually considered many aspects of running and managing variuos academic environments-small liberal arts schools or large public universities are all discussed. However, I wish it had discussed more of the pragmatic issues of working in and running a university library, such as dealing with student workers and university politics.

Just about everything that librarians do as professionals carries ethical implications. Matters of intellectual freedom are most commonly recognized as loci for ethics‐based decision making, but the totality of individual and collective conduct is in need of practical, normative ethical structure. What is argued for here is a framework founded on rights. In order to achieve the goal of rights as foundation, processes of deliberation within librarianship must be established. The most show more attractive form of deliberation is discourse ethics that recognizes the dialectic nature of this (or any) profession. The result is an ethical state that serves the good of both the profession and communities. show less

Very thought provoking, with some interesting critiques of the ACRL standards, both as written and as implemented.