Over at It’s All Good, Alane asks something I’ve heard from time to time: why are we so knee-jerk about patron confidentiality? When it comes to encouraging technologies that trade a little patron privacy for convenience, we can be party-poopers.
The answer is yes, sometimes we go farther than we need to on behalf of this concept, such as librarians that hesitate to let patrons pick up their own reserves. But sometimes we need to go that far, and the reasons behind our caution can’t be captured in a check-off sentence on a library card form someone is rushing to fill out so they can go home with a pile of bestsellers.
Take the Patriot Act. It’s not an illusion or a concept; it’s a fact. Section 215 is a fact. You couldn’t make this stuff up; sneak and peek and roving wiretaps are concepts worthy of Tricky Dick himself. Yet the problems with the Patriot Act can’t be easily captured in sound bites (though kudos to the ACLU for its efforts to do so).
Not only that, the Patriot Act doesn’t come with a warning label listing our government’s many earlier attempts to turn the Bill of Rights into ancient history. At any given time, other laws are attempting to work their way through the system, struggling to worm their way through the Constitution, weakening our liberties, making it easier to spy on innocent citizens.
Sometimes in our cautions we librarians look mulish and foolish. I’m sure that’s how Zoia Horn seemed to some back in the early 1970s when she went to jail rather than turn over the records of her patrons (who happened to be the Chicago Seven). To many people since then, Zoia has been a living symbol of everything we believe in and cherish as librarians. Zoia had the long view, and time has proved her right.
Andrew Abbott, in The System of Professions, talks about every profession having a unique “heartland of work.” In our profession, our hammers keep changing, and so do our nails, almost faster than we can imagine. Yet we continue to be librarians. That’s because we have values and beliefs that are far more resilient than anything as prosaic as a book or catalog card (or website). One of our finest qualities is our willingness, even passion, to advocate on behalf of the people we serve, on behalf of principles we know are valid. Sometimes we seem mulish and foolish when we do so, but that doesn’t make us wrong.
Posted on this day, other years:
- From D.C. to Houston to the Holiday Inn in Tallahassee - 2009
- Made Possible By: Succeeding with Sponsorship - 2006
- Hey, But Tell Us What You Really Think! - 2004
Amen to what you say, Karen. Do not forget that we also have a legal obligation in many states to protect patron records and privacy. New York State has such a law. Beyond that, it is a basic part of being a librarian.
The problem, in my mind, is that we can do both things – we can give personalized services and protect confidentiality of patron records – but that we err on the side of only doing one.
Granted, what I know about data mining could fit in the thimble of a thimble, but this person appears to know a fair amount and states that we could meet both goals IF we pay attention to implementing the technology correctly. Obviously, that is a big IF, but working with ILS vendors, our communities, and implementing the technology correctly, we could find ourselves in a win-win situation.
Check out what Scott has to say at his site:
http://www.bibliomining.com/nicholson/biblioprocess.htm
About half-way down he has a section on patron privacy and how to process records in a way that protects privacy. I assume that Sirsi has taken such advice in their Normative Data Project – which if I understand it correctly (think thimble of a thimble again) is collecting transaction level data in a warehouse for further analysis by libraries to assist them in making all sorts of decisions.
That’s fair enough, though I wonder if some of our hesitation isn’t driven by concerns that somehow or another, if we gather it, it will get abused. After listening to Mueller, I think our prudence may be warranted.