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It has been argued that it is in the best interests of IT professionals, to adopt and enforce professional codes in the work place. But there is no code for usability engineers, unless one accepts that it is a branch of software engineering. The new joint ACM/IEEE‐CS Software Engineering Code of Ethics is applied to actual usability cases. This enables usability engineers to interpret this code in their profession. This is achieved by utilizing four case studies both directly in terms of the ethical issues involved and in the light of the code. Also examined are the short‐comings of the code for the domain of usability engineering, and suggestions are made for enhancements for future revisions of the code.

Recently two reports appeared in the press, each of which expressed a very different attitude towards intellectual property. One, in the Australian press, discusses a bill before the US House of Representatives that would “give American copyright holders freedom to hack PCs used to illicitly share files over peer‐to‐peer (P2P) networks, without fear of prosecution or litigation”. That this represents a fairly strong view of the importance of intellectual property can be seen further as the report continues.

In selecting the contributions to this special issue, the editors have tried to plot a course that describes the state of the AI field for both the reader unacquainted with AI and for those who are. We have done this by selecting key research papers in the areas of AI that are impacting and will continue to impact libraries and by including sidebars that give context to the research papers. The language of the research papers is not simplified; AI is not a simple field. But neither is it incomprehensible, so if parts of this special issue are found to be difficult, the reader is advised to concentrate on the overall ideas rather than their specific expression.

Technology facilitates certain behaviours. This underlies the argument that the Internet may not be as benign as we might like to think. It is argued in this paper, through examination of the case of the capture of a large number of people on charges of possession of child pornography, that the Internet constitutes a kind of unintentional entrapment. Some consequences of this are explored.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the reasons behind unethical behaviour in the Australian Information and Communications Technology (ICT) workplace.

The study employed a qualitative research methodology. A total of 43 ICT professionals were interviewed during the month of February 2014 in six Australian capital cities. All interviews were conducted face-to-face and followed a semi-structured interviewing format utilising open-end questions and further probing questions. The purposive sample represented ICT professionals from large and small organisations, government and private sector, different geographic locations, ages, genders, types of jobs and employment experience. Data analysis was completed with the help of QSR NVivo 10, a software package for managing qualitative data.

Of the 25 reasons identified for unethical behaviour in ICT workplaces, 30 per cent of participants agreed on five major ones: pressure, bad management, greed, lack of respect towards ICT and communication issues.

By focussing on the reasons behind unethical behaviour in the Australian ICT workplace, this article helps those identifying strategies for dealing with unprofessional behaviour to take into account the root causes of unprofessional behaviour.

There is hardly any literature on reasons for unethical behaviour in the ICT workplaces. This article seeks to address this imbalance in the literature. Also, integrity systems in ICT are a new focus in collective, organisational ethics. Identification of and resolving unethical ICT workplace practice is an innovative contribution to the literature.

The rapid advance of computer‐based technology has led to social policy vacuums. Most information systems development tools concentrate upon technical issues, and offer few if any guidelines that address the moral issues inherent in new application possibilities. It is argued that extension of such tools to include ethical and moral, human and environmental issues is possible. A good starting point is provided by mapping relevant clauses of professional codes of ethics upon each stage of the development methodology. We use as examples the Australian Computer Society Code of Ethics and the structured systems analysis and design method (SSADM).

The purpose of this paper is to add one further value to the previously articulated “universal values” and to describe the constituent components of three universal values.

This interpretive/constructivist study of Australia's largest online community of seniors involved a 30‐month ethnographic investigation. After an initial period of 11 months of observing social interaction on the entire site, in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 30 participants, selected according to criterion sampling, a form of purposive sampling.

Four key moral values were identified: equality, freedom, respect and trust. All of them had been found in other studies, with equality and respect (as human dignity) identified as universal values. The findings from this study suggest that freedom is another universal value.

This study extends the understanding of universal values to include freedom. Further, it demonstrates the constituent components for freedom, and those of two other universal values previously identified in the literature, equality and human dignity, as well as revealing linkages between these three values.

This paper seeks to look at the question of accuracy of content regarding Wikipedia and other internet encyclopædias.

By looking at other sources, the paper considers whether the information contained within Wikipedia can be relied on to be accurate.

Wikipedia poses as an encyclopædia when by no stretch of the definition can it be termed such; therefore, it should be subject to regulation.

The paper highlights the issue that, without regulation, content cannot be relied on to be accurate.

As information services become more complex and the methods of delivery more diverse, the professionals providing this service must become skilled in problem solving, and have a sound theoretical understanding of their discipline. It is not sufficient to offer users vague, unsatisfactory solutions to their problems because we are unsure of our own strategies. As educators, we must look to the best means accessible to us to systematize our discipline; expert system development applied in a variety of subject areas is worthy of close examination as a means of working towards this goal.

Because much human knowledge consists of elementary fragments of know‐how, applying a significant amount of knowledge requires new ways to organize decision‐making fragments into competent wholes. Knowledge systems collect these fragments in a knowledge base and then access the knowledge base to reason about each specific problem. As a consequence, knowledge systems differ from conventional programs in the way they're organized, the way they incorporate knowledge, the way they execute, and the impression they create through their interactions. Knowledge systems simulate expert human performance, and they present a humanlike facade to the user.