Teaching Ethics to Teens Via School Library Reference Services

School library reference services daily deal with legal and ethical issues: copyright and other intellectual property issues, security and confidentiality, equity issues, all of which have expanded with technology advances. Not only can school librarians model ethical behavior when providing reference services, but they can also take advantage of this learning moment to incorporate instruction on ethical use of information. In particular, the various processes in conducting research offer opportunities for reference services to instruct students on ethical behaviors: posing ethical research questions, collecting data ethically, minimizing risks to subjects and subject matter, maintaining an ethical relationship with people who are impacted by the research, identifying ethical (and unethical) aspects of sources, analying data ethically, and reporting data ethically. Stages of ethcial behavior, and its application to digital citizenship, also impact of school librarian instruction effectiveness.