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, this interactive session will tackle key privacy issues in the researcher, vendor, and library framework. It will kick off with John Felts of Coastal Carolina staffing his post as “Privacy Librarian” while training a new library employee. A stream of patrons (The Charleston Players) will try to stump him with their privacy questions and research scenarios.

After this tour through privacy issues, John will be joined by other speakers including a vendor and a publisher to highlight the context in which these patron questions exist. Topics will include privacy in accessing online content, sharing information for personalization, who has access to third party data, and privacy challenges in open access publishing.