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Keywords
Libraries, Privacy, Library users, Ethics, Data protection
Abstract
With digital technology libraries can archive considerable resources of detailed information about their users. This data is generally regarded as confidential between the library and the individual, but it has potential interest for commercial organisations, law enforcement and security agencies, and libraries themselves, to assist in marketing their services, The Privacy in the Digital Library Environment project at Loughborough University, 2000-2002, investigated the issues this raises. Findings suggested that users had low levels of anxiety about privacy when using libraries, but this was because they expected that libraries would not pass on personal data to other bodies. Librarians, whilst respecting privacy as a professional value in principle, did not give it a high rating against other values. Additionally, a significant minority of libraries was not well prepared for data protection. To assist the professional community, guidelines for privacy policy were drawn up on the basis of suggestions made by survey respondents.
Introduction
The swift technical development of information and communication technologies (ICT) and consumer take-up has, on the one hand, been the major source of positive economic and social change in the last decade, but has, on the other hand, raised many serious concerns. Not the least of these is a general fear over the threats to personal privacy that the use of ICTs pose (Blendon et al., 2001). This fear has obvious implications for libraries as so many of them move towards hybrid or fully digital status. In response to this the Legal and Policy Research Group at Loughborough University's Department of Information Science carried out a series of investigations between June 2000 and December 2001. This "Privacy in the Digital Library Environment" project was funded by Re:source (the UK Council on Museums, Libraries and Archives). The following is an account of the findings of the research, which develops the themes previously outlined in Sturges et al. (2001).
The problem
Librarians have collected information about individuals, as long as there have been libraries. Details such as users' names and addresses, status (e.g. junior/adult, members of the organisation or external users, etc.), entitlements to borrow, and borrowing records are routinely collected. This data is frequently collated as anonymised management statistics on, for...