New Trends in Content Creation: Changing Responsibilities for Librarians

This paper addresses the changes in the role of li-brarians as information intermediaries due to the in-troduction of new forms of digital content brought about by modern information and communication technologies. The main focus is on the way in which these changes have affected the moral responsibilities of librarians. Six content trends are identified in sup-port of this claim. These are: the growth in volume; amount of noise; sharing of content and information participation; personal space; collaboration and naive use. The ethical challenges of these six trends are discussed. Because of the unpredictability and un-controllability of contemporary digital content, a case is made that the traditional model of retrospective responsibility, according to which responsibility is as-signed based on causality, should be supplemented with a positive prospective model of responsibili-ty according to which librarians also need to look ‘forward ’ anticipating possible harmful impacts of modern ICTs. It is also argued, based on the open and interactive nature of new forms of content, that there should be a form of shared and distributed re-sponsibility, which should include not only librarians, but also Internet service providers, library users, and software designers