Some of the best meals I have ever eaten were paid for by sales representatives from companies with which my library did business or could potentially do business, and some of my favorite events at professional meetings were sponsored by vendors. As the head of a technical services department in a large academic health sciences library in the 1980s, I had many opportunities to be “wined and dined” by sales representatives, and I even developed close personal relationships with a few of them. As nagging doubts about the propriety of these activities began bothering me, I sometimes “reciprocated” with giving small gifts, such as bottles of wine, or by paying for the meal myself. My doubts about the propriety of these activities were solidified in 1990, when I started working in a library for a large federal agency that was embroiled in an influence-peddling scandal. I realized during my first day of work, when I had to take an oath to accept absolutely nothing from companies with which the agency might do business, that I needed to be even more careful about how I interacted with vendors. Libraries spend a huge amount of money on information resources and services provided by outside vendors, and I think our relationships with vendors pose some of our most difficult personal ethical dilemmas. We need to have a good working relationship with our vendors so that we can get the best products and services possible. An important question to ask ourselves is: “How can we develop relationships with our vendors or potential vendors that enable us to determine which products and services we need, while avoiding conflicts of interest?” Many members of the Medical Library Association (MLA) have been involved in an ongoing informal debate about ethics issues for years. People sometimes use “ethics” and “conflict of interest” interchangeably in their discussions of these issues. The Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines ethics as “the principles of conduct governing an individual or group (professional)” or “a guiding philosophy” [1]. A “conflict of interest” is defined in the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) conflict-of-interest/disclosure policy as follows: A conflict of interest can be considered to exist in any economic, professional, business, political, volunteer, or personal instance in which the actions or activities of an individual on behalf of AAHSL could involve obtaining personal gain or advantage to the individual or the individual's immediate family and could be unfair to the organization. [2] Ethical issues generally fall into one of four categories: association ethics, professional ethics, institutional ethics, and personal ethics. However, the lines between these issues are overlapping, and it is hard to discuss one without the others.