Libraries and Learning
Lessons from the Facebook Fiasco
April 15, 2018
“Privacy is essential to the exercise of free speech, free thought, and free association. . . . The library profession has a long-standing commitment to an ethic of facilitating, not monitoring, access to information.” Privacy: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights, 2001-2002.
“We protect each library user’s right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.” American Library Association Code of EthicsAdopted 1939, last amended 2008.
It was interesting to learn about a new product designed to personalize the library experience for public library patrons shortly after watching Mark Zuckerberg being grilled by members of Congress. Thanks to a Twitter thread posted by Becky Yoose, a systems librarian who works for a large public library, I now know OCLC, a global library cooperative based in the US, best known for its shared catalog WorldCat, has acquired Wise, a subsystem for what librarians call an “ILS” – an integrated library system that combines the catalog with library functions such as keeping track of who has checked out what. This new system will do much more – in a sense, cataloging library users and tying their interests to library materials and programs through marketing.
Librarians like to think privacy is an essential feature of freedom of inquiry, and keeping track of what you’ve read in the past once you’ve returned a book is none of our business, even if it makes us seem less convenient or user-friendly than all of the other systems that remember things for us. It’s too bad that we can’t tell you whether you’ve read John Sanford’s Extreme Prey already. (It’s understandably hard to keep track when all 26 books in the series have the word “prey” in the title.) That inconvenience is outweighed by possibility that your reading history could be used to hurt you or another of our library users. Reading should never be used as evidence against you – and the freedom to read widely shouldn’t be chilled by concerns that your reading records may be stored and used against your will.
Sure, we were scorned by officials after 9/11 who said “the government doesn’t care about what James Patterson novel you read” and “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to hide.” Some of my reading records could look mighty suspicious if someone suspected I was up to no good. What if what you’ve been reading was obtained and published by someone who had a grudge and wanted to publicly provoke a reaction? Could get messy. Luckily, that can’t happen if those records aren’t kept.
That said, a lot of librarians think library privacy is an outdated, slightly ridiculous obsession, given literally billions of people have signed up for social media platforms and are used to getting algorithmic recommendations. Aren’t libraries letting our patrons down if we don’t personalize our