Category: Professional ethics, oaths, and pledges (ethics). Each language text below is one published, write-once file; the CID is computed over its exact bytes and is what an IFP-21 citation pins.
Restatement per IFP-22 Section 2.3. The Code is copyrighted by the American Library Association; this entry is the registry's own prose describing what the Code holds, as of the accessed date.
The American Library Association's Code of Ethics states the values of librarianship in nine principles. First adopted in 1939 and amended several times since, it reached its current form in 2021, when a ninth principle on racial and social justice was added. The ALA publishes the authoritative text at the source URL; this entry describes what the Code holds in the registry's own words.
The Code is notable for how openly it lives with conflict among its own commitments — service, intellectual freedom, privacy, property rights, and institutional duty pull against each other in real libraries, and the Code presents its principles as commitments to be balanced rather than rules that never collide.
Its nine principles commit library workers to: the highest level of service to all users, through organized resources, equitable policies and access, and accurate, unbiased, courteous answers; intellectual freedom, with active resistance to censorship of library resources; the protection of each user's privacy and confidentiality in what they seek, read, borrow, or transmit; respect for intellectual property rights, balanced against the interests of information users; fair and respectful treatment of coworkers, and advocacy for employment conditions that safeguard employee rights and welfare; the refusal to advance private interests at the expense of users, colleagues, or employing institutions; the separation of personal conviction from professional duty, so that personal belief does not interfere with fair representation of the institution's aims or with access to its resources; excellence in the profession, through one's own development and the encouragement of others'; and the affirmation of the inherent dignity and rights of every person, with work to recognize and dismantle systemic and individual biases and to confront inequity and oppression.
Prepared from the instrument as published at the source URL, read as of the accessed date. Corrections — whether because the ALA amends the Code or disputes this characterization — ship as a superseding version; this version remains published because citations to it remain outstanding (IFP-22, Sections 2.3 and 4).