Andrew Pace had an interesting post about library Sacred Cow #1: patron privacy. His solution is to provide different levels of privacy to patrons. Basically his approach is having a privacy setting scale similar to what you be familiar in a web browser and let the patrons choose. Personally, I think this would be a great approach. Patrons are wise enough to make there own decisions on this. If a library
choose to implement something like this, I think it would be prudent for the library to describe the pros and cons of choosing different settings (and should make the default very protective of privacy).
Many patrons would love to have this choice. On a number of occasions at the reference desk or over the phone a student or faculty member wanted to know what book they checked out a few weeks ago and I couldn’t help them because we didn’t have that information readily available. I have heard from people who work in interlibrary loan at different colleges about patrons wanting similar information about articles they requested in the past. These are just very basic examples. I think it is
obvious that if we collected circulation and other information we could provide better service to our patrons, be it recommender systems, customized new book alerts, etc.
The question is, why don’t libraries do this? One reason is that no one has really built tools that can handle this type of system (although with the advent of VuFind, the eXtensible Catalog, and other projects, this is beginning to change). There are, of course, librarians who are, rightly so, worried about privacy. However, if adult patrons are giving an educated choice, this argument is almost a non sequitur to me. In fact, but not providing this choice, it is conceivable that we are
opening patrons up for more risks to their privacy as they use other tools and services outside the library that will not be protected by state library privacy laws.
I am concerned about privacy as much as most librarians, but at some point we have to make a decision. If we are going to make information and services available to patrons there is always an offset between privacy and access. The only way we could avoid all possible privacy implications about patrons using our resources is to not make any resources available to them. So, we are already making a sliding scale between access/service and privacy — only we aren’t letting the patron make their
own decision. We are making it for them. One thing I believe libraries need to be concerned with is the amount of information available outside of libraries. If we don’t make our quality information easily available, people will go elsewhere. If this happens in large enough numbers, we won’t have to worry about patron privacy, because we won’t have any patrons.
In one of the comments to this post, Roy Tennant mentioned that he is that he is baffled by the reflectance to adopt a solution such as Pace proposes. Roy writes “I think a lot of folks have forgotten the days when there were cards in the book that listed everyone who had checked the book out. Where was privacy then?” This is a good question. Some librarians like to dwell on all of today’s
privacy risks while at the same time ignoring what libraries have done long before the turn of the century and the advent of Library 2.0.
Whenever a discussion about Library 2.0 applications come up in a conference session or an an e-mail list, almost invariably someone brings up privacy as a reason not to do this. Recently, I remember reading a blog post, e-mail, or article (sorry, I couldn’t find it anywhere) where someone questioned if the real reason some librarians bring up privacy in because they are afraid or against change. I wouldn’t go that far, but I do think that it may be part of it. I do believe most librarians
are legitimately concerned about privacy - however we shouldn’t let this concern be the end-all of our being. We need to find ways to provide these enhanced services while still working to protect privacy of our patrons. I think Pace’s concept could be one tool in our arsenal for doing this.
