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Abstract
Archival codes of ethics currently substitute lists of rules for moral guidance, possibly worsening a lack of societal respect for archives and archivists. This paper recommends the adoption of principal precepts to guide archivists in unfamiliar situations and to enhance the professionalization of archival enterprise. These principal precepts are confidentiality, dissociation, veracity, and "avoidance of the irreversible." Adoption of these precepts will move archival enterprise toward meriting the "Public Trust" and acceptance as a "trust profession."
Introduction
Archivists ride the horns of dilemmas, constantly juggling priorities to minimize conflict. Such dilemmas include
* the need to conserve versus the need to handle delicate items,
* the need to acquire versus lack of storage space,
* privacy rights versus the public's right to know,
* the need for financial patronage versus the need for autonomy,
* an item's enduring value versus the cost of its conservation requirements, and
* the lure of new preservation technologies versus their unproven lon - gevity.
To choose the lemma, that "horn" upon which to ride, archivists use intuition, judgment based on training, institutional guidelines, and documents such as the Core Values of Archivists and the Code of Ethics for Archivists (Society of American Archivists, 2011, 2012, 2012). These two documents purport to guide the behavior of archivists who master their 2,300 words. Their histories, found, for example, in Horn (1989, pp. 65 -66) and Cox (2008, pp. 1128-1129), show that committees repeatedly refined these documents, rather than defining fundamental concepts such as "ethics," "trust," and "profession."
I suggest that such codes prevent archivists from acting ethically in any sense other than a circular "according to the code of ethics." Karl Popper (1966, p. 552) presented a similar position, excerpted in van Meijl (2000, p. 74) and Wallace (2010, p. 178):
What does it [scientific ethics] aim at? At telling us what we ought to do, i.e., at constructing a code of norms upon a scientific basis, so that we need only look up the index of the code if we are faced with a difficult moral decision? This clearly would be absurd; quite apart from the fact that if it could be achieved, it would destroy all personal responsibility and therefore all ethics.
Hauptman and Hill (1991, p....