The American Library Association lists privacy/confidentiality as one of the core values of librarianship. As libraries adopt new and emerging technologies in an era of rapid change, one of the challenges we face is that of balancing privacy with convenience.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s School of Information Sciences is currently conducting research on public libraries and patron privacy. If you work at a public library in the United States, please consider completing their survey and sharing it with colleagues to help get the word out. The results of this research will leave us all with a clearer understanding of the library privacy landscape and the challenges our organizations face!