A stolen credit card number can truly mess up a person's life. Divulging information about a person's reading interests or web browsing history can also have a potentially very destructive impact on a person's life, but in other ways. So I wouldn't agree that the privacy of library records is less important than the privacy of other types of records.
Best wishes,
Faye Leibowitz
General Languages Team Leader
Catalog Management Unit
University Library System
University of Pittsburgh
frleibo_at_pitt.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Kyle Banerjee
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2008 3:47 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] pandora [privacy]
> 3) Ask ourselves, "To what degree is it the librarian's job to
> protect people's privacy versus educating people about privacy?" In
> some way our professional ethics are in impediment to creating
> services our users increasingly expect.
This question is worth asking. I'm scratching my head as to why we believe people should have much greater privacy expectations when using a library than when using a credit card, email, ecommerce site, or just about any other service. As a group, we librarians seem to think our data and technology-based services require enough privacy to satisfy any black helicopter conspiracy theorist.
Things have not always been this way. I don't remember everyone whining when people filled their names on paper library cards (in fact, it was common to look at who checked materials out). Had we always been as paranoid as we are now, we'd be randomly shelving books and journals in brown paper wrappers so people couldn't tell what others were reading and we'd conduct reference interviews in booths where voices would be distorted and faces would be masked to preserve anonymity.
To satisfy an information need, you need to know a little about the context of the need. If you know a little about who is asking a question and why, you're much more likely to give a useful answer. Our obsession with making sure we have as little context as possible to work with is why everyone wonders why our services aren't keeping pace with the growing number of alternatives our users have.
We need to be concerned about appropriate use of data, but over the past few years we've gone over the deep end.
Received on Fri Jan 25 2008 - 16:20:04 EST