The Privacy Librarian Is In! How Privacy Issues Affect Researchers and Libraries

Faced with an increasingly complex online environment through which libraries provide access to scholarly resources, librarians have found it difficult to educate users in protecting their personal information and online behaviors from inappropriate and sometimes unauthorized use while promoting the personalization services that users find beneficial.

Modeled after the long-running Peanuts cartoon with Lucy offering advice for 5 cents, a panel composed of librarians, a vendor, and a publisher convened an interactive session that tackled key privacy issues in the researcher, vendor, and library framework. It began with the “Privacy Librarian” training a new library employee while a stream of patrons asked them privacy-related questions and research
scenarios.

After this tour through privacy issues, the panel highlighted the context in which these patron questions existed. Topics included privacy considerations in complex authentication schemas, website tracking, browser security, campus surveillance, and data privacy in third-party vendor accounts.