Aleksandra Horvat

The revival of interest for the ethical issues in the library community is related both to the changes brought about by the application of new technologies in libraries and the societal changes taking place in the countries in transition. A survey of five ethical codes of national library associations of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Serbia and Montenegro was made and professional values emphasised in the codes were compared. In order to find out whether the professional values proclaimed in the codes agree with the personal attitudes of librarians an investigation of the professional values of Croatian librarians was conducted. The preliminary results point to the conclusion that Croatian librarians share at least some of the values with their colleagues in other parts of the world, while some of the values have not yet been fully recognised. Introduction The revival of interest for the ethical issues can certainly be related to the changes in the library environment brought about by new technologies, whose introduction has deeply affected and transformed the library work. Although there is no agreement on whether or not new technologies have introduced new ethical issues, (1) ethics seems to have become an interesting topic for the information profession. Even if it is true that the debate on ethics started among computing and philosophy professionals in the early 1990s and that librarians followed later, (2) the library profession current interest in ethics is easily confirmed by only a superficial glance in a bibliographic database, such as Emerald, that reveals 25 articles on library ethics published between 1996 and 2002.