Care Ethics for French Twenty-First-Century Librarians: Examining Ecologie Documentaire and an Ethics of Care for the Environment.

For Mary Niles Maack the ethics of care was central to librarianship. She viewed it as foundational to libraries' history and mission of providing equal access and services to everyone. While there is much disillusionment today about progress collective living conditions and the future of the earth we need to rethink the ethics of care in libraries with new perspectives on the vulnerabilities of patrons (caring about) ways of responding to the needs of vulnerable beings (care receiving) and the consequences for librarians of developing appropriate skills and responsibilities (caregiving and caring for). In this article I look at these issues to see how they are already reflected in current library practices and services with an emphasis on their development in francophone countries. I observe that the increase in scope of the ethics of care from a human perspective to a living perspective opens new ways for libraries to be ethical political safe and yet also subversive places. By extending the ethics of care to all sentient beings in listening to everyone's stories and giving them a voice in preserving these narratives in their catalogs librarians promote a profession dedicated to the equal treatment of all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]