Your Privacy, A Librarian's Duty

by Beth Cronk, Litchfield head librarian

I’m going to take the same route as my last column and give you a quick explanation to a common question first.  We have changed the link on our Chamber of Commerce library page so that it now leads you to our blog.  I know this has confused some people, because the “Litchfield Public Library” link used to lead directly to the Pioneerland catalog.  But it makes more sense for a link about the Litchfield Library to lead you to further information on our library, and I’d like our patrons to get familiar with going directly to http://litchlibrary.blogspot.com/ as our primary website.  On our blog, you’ll see “Library Catalog” as a choice on the right side of the screen.  This link will lead you to the catalog and the ability to view your account.  You can add either the Litchfield Library site or the Pioneerland catalog, or both, to your favorites on your computer, and then you can go directly there without following such a long path.

The main topic I want to cover today is privacy and how it applies at the library.  Maybe you’ve gotten frustrated in the past about not being able to check out a family member’s books with your card or without a card at all.  Part of the reason we require a card is to make sure that the person checking things out is the person to whom the library account belongs.  If someone comes in and claims that they’re you or that they’re checking things out for you, and we go along with that, you could have books or movies checked out on your card without your knowledge.  The other risk is that we could check things out to the wrong John Smith if we look you up instead of using your card.  If you think of it like a credit card, it may make more sense that you need to have the card with you.  You’re financially liable for the materials you check out.

But beyond identity issues, there are also privacy issues.  The books you order with your card are your business.  Most of the time spouses wouldn’t need to keep library books a secret from each other.  But can you imagine a situation in which someone is looking into divorce without having brought it up to their spouse?  Or a woman who is in an abusive relationship who is checking out self-help books on getting out of such a situation?  We certainly wouldn’t want to hand those items over to their partners, not knowing whether or not they need to be kept private.   Or just imagine that, when we call your house, we tell the person who answers which books have come in for you  --  but it’s your mother-in-law who answers and you’ve ordered books on pregnancy when you haven’t yet shared the fact that you’re pregnant.  Or if someone’s child is in the library picking up their own books and they ask, “Does my dad have any books in?”, we could be violating his privacy by saying yes and handing over a book that he ordered on cancer or another health concern that he has not told his child about.  Now if that child comes in with Dad’s card and says, “My dad has a book in and he asked me to pick it up for him”, we can certainly send that with the errand runner.  

Pioneerland Library System has a patron confidentiality policy in place, and all of our employees are bound by that.  We cannot share with anyone, not our spouses or our best friends – or yours--, what you checked out at the library, what materials you ordered or looked at, or what reference questions you asked us.  If you have to worry that we’ll tell people what you’re researching or reading, you might not come to us to find information.  That would be a barrier to your freedom to read and to your access to information. 

The American Library Association’s Code of Ethics states:

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. 

Librarians are ethically required to keep your information requests and your check-out history private.  It is no one’s business what you research, what you order, or what you’ve checked out from the library.  This is why we cannot bring up a list of what you’ve checked out in the past.  Unless you enable check-out history on your account, once you return it, it disappears so that no one could ever access it. 

ALA’s statement Libraries: An American Value says, “Free access to the books, ideas, resources, and information in America’s libraries is imperative for education, employment, enjoyment, and self-government.”  I take that principle of protecting your privacy to protect your freedom very seriously.  It’s important for our democratic society.  Librarians don’t have quite the same legal privilege as lawyers and doctors as far as protection of the professional-client relationship.  But if you come to me with an information request, I promise I’ll keep it just between us.  It's my duty as your librarian.

Small Changes at the Library

By Beth Cronk, head librarian

We’ve had a few small changes at the library recently that I’d like to share with you. The first is temporary, but it will be obvious: we’ve got road construction. Marshall Avenue in front of the library is being blocked off as I write. Most likely it will be a beautiful stretch of street again by mid-summer, and in the meantime you can reach the library by Third Street and get into our parking lot. It’s Minnesota; road construction doesn’t surprise us.

Another change is online. We have a new blog. You can find it at http://litchlibrary.blogspot.com. When you go there, you’ll see a beautiful photo of the library that we’re using through a Creative Commons license. You’ll see a list of our hours. And you’ll find the library columns that we publish in the newspaper. If you ever read one that you want to share, there are built-in options to email an article, share it on Facebook or Twitter, or choose another option to share our blog posts with others.

In the bar on the right side of our blog, you’ll find links to the Pioneerland library catalog, to our Litchfield Public Library Facebook page and Twitter account, and to MnKnows, the Minnesota digital library I mentioned in my last article. I hope that having these links handy on the top of our blog will make it a one-stop shop you can go to for library information, the way our former website was. Below those links, you can participate in an American Library Association/public radio survey on your use of the library, subscribe to our blog posts, search the site, and find basic information about the library: our address, phone number and email address. It will all need some tweaking to improve the layout, but Google makes it so easy to create a blog that we were up and running within an hour.

If you go to our former address, http://litch.com/library, you’ll be re-directed to http://litch.com/living-in-litchfield/library. This is our Chamber of Commerce page, where you can still find our contact information and a link to the Pioneerland catalog. Whether you go from the Chamber’s page or our Litchlibrary blog, you can get to the catalog to search or to sign into your account.

Here’s another small change, this one a physical change inside the library: we’re in the process of separating our DVDs from our VHS tapes and our CDs from our cassettes. The largest sections, the movies and audio books on the adult side, are done. The rest will shift as we have time. We’re preparing for an inventory later this year which will require the formats to be separated. I think it’s a positive change that I plan to keep permanently. We’ve had requests in the past to separate the audio books this way so that patrons can look for just the format they can use. I hope that this will help you if you only have a DVD player or a VCR and not the other, so that you can browse the format you’re using.

We’ve also started adding “new” stickers to the newest movies and audio books on the adult side so that you can spot new releases, or at least new additions to our collection. I’ve added some classics, and we’ve gotten many wonderful donations recently, so some of those will be tagged as new items, as well.

One last change that I hope you’ll enjoy is the addition of a few popular music CDs to our mostly-classical CD collection. I’ve started working from lists of core music collections for small public libraries, adding just one a month. You’ll find two significant Beatles albums on our shelf now – without the CDs themselves, which are stored behind the desk like DVDs. Recently someone donated a Jonas Brothers CD, so that’s been added for a little bit of recent music.

I would be thrilled to accept donations of music CDs that you no longer want. We can’t accept cassettes or vinyl records, and we can never promise to add donations to our collection until we’ve had a chance to review them. But I would love to grow our music collection faster than our budget will allow, and your music donations could be great assets to the library. Please keep in mind that if you’ve copied a CD onto your MP3 player, you should keep the original instead of giving it to us. Copyright law forbids copying music that belongs to someone else, and if the library owns the CD, it’s illegal to make a copy of it for yourself. But if you don’t listen to it anymore or you’ve gone to all iTunes, all the time, we’ll be glad to receive it.

With a new manager, there are always some changes, and other changes are driven by outside forces. My goal is to keep our library running as smoothly as ever and to adjust things to serve the public better whenever I can find a way. I hope the small tweaks in how we’re doing things will help you find what you’re looking for at the library.