In library world, especially public library world, it is usually best to have an established and highly visible set of rules that patrons have to abide by when they are in the library. Depending on how your particular district is funded, the various state revised codes allow you to create a policy as approved by your Board of Trustees. In looking over various issues over the last few months about what it is that librarians are dealing with, it seems more and more apparent that this is a necessary tool to work with.
A lot of the issues that I have spoken about in this blog and things that I have had to deal with in the library where I work have revolved around patrons violating one or more of these guidelines. However, what I have come to notice even more is that in the IF world, these guidelines are also established to protect the patron and their right to access information.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Patriot Act...it goes on and on and on and on...
For those visually oriented policy wonks out there, the Center for Democracy and Technology created a comparison chart of the Judiciary committee meetings in the House and in the Senate regarding the USA Patriot Act Susnet Extension Act. Check it out here.
The standards that are being looked at in section 215 regarding national security letters are the heart of the issue regarding libraries (this includes the business records provision involving libraries). While the ALA favors the House version of the bill because of the increased scrutiny on the use of the NSLs, the Senate version is the favored one that looks likely to pass. They extended the vote to the end of February, so in hunting around to see the result (THOMAS, etc) I found the following a la Senator Lieberman and politico.com:
"After a wave of news about attempted domestic terror attacks, Democrats facing a tough election year quietly voted this week to extend the Patriot Act legislation that many of them had decried under former President George W. Bush.
The House passed a one-year reauthorization of the Patriot Act Thursday night 315-9, just a day after the Senate moved the bill on a late-evening unanimous voice vote.
With the law facing a sunset date of Feb. 28, the Senate opted to vote for the extension of three crucial provisions of the act rather than opening debate on a revised bipartisan plan passed by the Judiciary Committee in October that would have imposed stricter privacy safeguards.
“In the end, it became non-controversial,” Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) told POLITICO. “[There was] the growing concern about increase on the pace of attacks on the homeland… and frankly, I think the Patriot [Act] got a bad name under the Bush Administration.”
bad name indeed...
The standards that are being looked at in section 215 regarding national security letters are the heart of the issue regarding libraries (this includes the business records provision involving libraries). While the ALA favors the House version of the bill because of the increased scrutiny on the use of the NSLs, the Senate version is the favored one that looks likely to pass. They extended the vote to the end of February, so in hunting around to see the result (THOMAS, etc) I found the following a la Senator Lieberman and politico.com:
"After a wave of news about attempted domestic terror attacks, Democrats facing a tough election year quietly voted this week to extend the Patriot Act legislation that many of them had decried under former President George W. Bush.
The House passed a one-year reauthorization of the Patriot Act Thursday night 315-9, just a day after the Senate moved the bill on a late-evening unanimous voice vote.
With the law facing a sunset date of Feb. 28, the Senate opted to vote for the extension of three crucial provisions of the act rather than opening debate on a revised bipartisan plan passed by the Judiciary Committee in October that would have imposed stricter privacy safeguards.
“In the end, it became non-controversial,” Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) told POLITICO. “[There was] the growing concern about increase on the pace of attacks on the homeland… and frankly, I think the Patriot [Act] got a bad name under the Bush Administration.”
bad name indeed...
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Challenges to Graphic Novels
While it seems that the majority of books that are challenged have some fairly explicit content, or some other type of "trigger" - I have been noticing that Graphic Novels have been gaining steam in the ways that they are being presented. In our library, I always thought that the placement of these novels in the very back of the library in the least accessible corner was a bit suspect and not necessarily convenient. On more than one occasion, when an individual has asked me where our graphic novel collection is located and I show them, they make a comment about its location. This is usually after I ask them if they want 'adult' graphic novels or 'young adult' graphic novels...so I was not surprised to see a well thought out page by the ALA that is specifically dedicated to challenges to graphic novels.
While some of our class lectures have touched on the 'media response,' I wonder why there is a specific section dedicated to it on this particular ALA page? Is it just sort of standard for the challenges against various materials?
While some of our class lectures have touched on the 'media response,' I wonder why there is a specific section dedicated to it on this particular ALA page? Is it just sort of standard for the challenges against various materials?
Sunday, February 21, 2010
AS IF!
While scanning the information super highway looking for something to pontificate on, I came across a rather interesting group of individuals that many of you have probably heard of. It is the group AS IF! (Authors Supporting Intellectual Freedom) and if I am reading the information correctly, it was formed when the board of trustees at Austin's St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Texas turned down a $3 million gift because the donor wanted Annie Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain" removed from the optional reading list for 12th-graders.
They maintain a blog, but it has not been updated for a while - but the link to the original story can be found here
What interests me about this story is that is runs completely opposite of another story that I read about a few months ago about some zany New Zealand author named Brian Edwards who thinks that libraries are committing 'grand theft' by loaning out books. He has since removed the post from his blog because he took a pretty severe cyber-beat down, but parts of it can be found here.
While these two stories touch on different themes of Intellectual Freedom and Intellectual Property, it gave me warm fuzzies to read one and chills o read the other.
They maintain a blog, but it has not been updated for a while - but the link to the original story can be found here
What interests me about this story is that is runs completely opposite of another story that I read about a few months ago about some zany New Zealand author named Brian Edwards who thinks that libraries are committing 'grand theft' by loaning out books. He has since removed the post from his blog because he took a pretty severe cyber-beat down, but parts of it can be found here.
While these two stories touch on different themes of Intellectual Freedom and Intellectual Property, it gave me warm fuzzies to read one and chills o read the other.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Oregon Intellectual Freedom Clearinghouse
WOW!
I know that this was assigned reading, but I feel that it is worthy of a blog post due to the complexity of the site and the depth that they choose to use in exploring the issue. I would imagine that one of the most daunting tasks that faces somebody when responding to an issue relevant to this topic is where do they derive their primary authority? If you are in a library system that has not quite defined this avenue or has not yet had to implement this type of policy, the OIFC is a great place to start.
As I was reading the list of 2009 challenges, I was not to surprised at some of the titles and the subject matter that they dealt with. I know that this report does not go into the depth necessary to understand both a patron and library point of view, but some of the challenges seemed fairly far-fetched. 17 of the 18 challenges for the reporting period were retained without any revision to their original classification. The one item that was removed was done so as a result of inaccurate factual information.
One thing that troubles me - why would the OIFC choose to identify one of the challenges as being initiated by a religious organization and the rest as 'patron challenges?' There is no way that you can tell me that the 17 other challenges were exclusively made by individuals who somehow stated explicitly that there challenges were not because of religious motives. Granted, the one that was identified probably did so formally, but by singling it out in their report, the OIFC intentionally creates an unnecessary form of animosity. I would like to know more about this reporting decision...
I know that this was assigned reading, but I feel that it is worthy of a blog post due to the complexity of the site and the depth that they choose to use in exploring the issue. I would imagine that one of the most daunting tasks that faces somebody when responding to an issue relevant to this topic is where do they derive their primary authority? If you are in a library system that has not quite defined this avenue or has not yet had to implement this type of policy, the OIFC is a great place to start.
As I was reading the list of 2009 challenges, I was not to surprised at some of the titles and the subject matter that they dealt with. I know that this report does not go into the depth necessary to understand both a patron and library point of view, but some of the challenges seemed fairly far-fetched. 17 of the 18 challenges for the reporting period were retained without any revision to their original classification. The one item that was removed was done so as a result of inaccurate factual information.
One thing that troubles me - why would the OIFC choose to identify one of the challenges as being initiated by a religious organization and the rest as 'patron challenges?' There is no way that you can tell me that the 17 other challenges were exclusively made by individuals who somehow stated explicitly that there challenges were not because of religious motives. Granted, the one that was identified probably did so formally, but by singling it out in their report, the OIFC intentionally creates an unnecessary form of animosity. I would like to know more about this reporting decision...
Monday, February 8, 2010
Burning Man and IF?
I am taking some advice....and taking a vacation from heavy IF reporting on the front lines and going to spin a yarn about something else...
The town that I grew up in is probably best known for two things - the annual rodeo that fills our streets with horsecrap for a week in September and a certain brand of wool blankets. However, there is a sub-culture that exists that you only hear whispers about among the hippies that hide in the mountains. They are the Burning Man Alumni. For such a small town, you would be surprised to see the heavy traffic in the well-worn tracks that lead from Eastern Oregon to the Nevada desert. So having heard rumors (and many entertaining stories that are on the verge of legality) of this festival growing up, I was equally surprised to see it come across in the literature of the profession that I have chosen. This article is from the current edition of the Intellectual Freedom Round Table of the ALA and is worth the next 5 minutes of your life. (click on the latest issue)
What caught my attention the most was not the fact of the individuals involved/profiled, but the statement that IFRT made in comparing the activities of the two seemingly unlikely roommates on the IF front.
The Burning Man mission statement reads - "Our intention is to generate society that connects each individual to his or her creative powers, to participation in community, to the larger realm of civic life, and to the even greater world of nature that exists beyond society."
Now doesn't that just scream IF? WTF? Sure, there are some catchy library speak phrases in there that can be parsed out and doled to the intellectual freedomistas - aka "civic life," "society" something or other...but to make the leap from that to a blind endorsement of IFRT support of Burning Man is even too much for this reformed University of Oregon dropout. (There is a reason why the Dead would always pass through Eugene!)
There are some pretty enticing topics in this edition, and it is worth it to read about the Pornography Panel as well. But if this is the core of what I have to inspire me this week, then I think I'll hit the snooze button one more time.
The town that I grew up in is probably best known for two things - the annual rodeo that fills our streets with horsecrap for a week in September and a certain brand of wool blankets. However, there is a sub-culture that exists that you only hear whispers about among the hippies that hide in the mountains. They are the Burning Man Alumni. For such a small town, you would be surprised to see the heavy traffic in the well-worn tracks that lead from Eastern Oregon to the Nevada desert. So having heard rumors (and many entertaining stories that are on the verge of legality) of this festival growing up, I was equally surprised to see it come across in the literature of the profession that I have chosen. This article is from the current edition of the Intellectual Freedom Round Table of the ALA and is worth the next 5 minutes of your life. (click on the latest issue)
What caught my attention the most was not the fact of the individuals involved/profiled, but the statement that IFRT made in comparing the activities of the two seemingly unlikely roommates on the IF front.
The Burning Man mission statement reads - "Our intention is to generate society that connects each individual to his or her creative powers, to participation in community, to the larger realm of civic life, and to the even greater world of nature that exists beyond society."
Now doesn't that just scream IF? WTF? Sure, there are some catchy library speak phrases in there that can be parsed out and doled to the intellectual freedomistas - aka "civic life," "society" something or other...but to make the leap from that to a blind endorsement of IFRT support of Burning Man is even too much for this reformed University of Oregon dropout. (There is a reason why the Dead would always pass through Eugene!)
There are some pretty enticing topics in this edition, and it is worth it to read about the Pornography Panel as well. But if this is the core of what I have to inspire me this week, then I think I'll hit the snooze button one more time.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
This week at your local public library...
My intent is not to piggy-back posts for the sake of posting, but here goes.
If you have made it this far into this particular blog, then you know that one of our public computers was taken from our building for an investigation into allegations of illegal Internet activity regarding minors....'nuff said.
Not too big of a deal at this point because the local authorities secured the proper paperwork to do so and it was all carried out in a fairly safe and secure manner. But one thing has been sticking with me throughout this whole process. Our public Internet computers do not erase the browsing history until just before midnight for each day that we are open. In order for this to happen, they have to be plugged into our network and basically they are cleared out (cache, cookies, passwords, all of that) and we start carte blanche every day. While there are very practical and technical reasons for this, part of it is also due to the fact that we do not monitor 'behavior' patterns of our patrons on the Internet.
Well...the computer in question was taken from us earlier this year and on the day of the incident, per our library procedures set in place to deal with this, I unplugged the computer from the network and powered it down. Meaning, it left the building before the'dump' (in the afternoon) and the browsing history of every other patron that used the computer prior to the individual who was busted was then made available to the local detectives. Part of what makes this tricky is that our IT department was informed and backed up the files for this individual in question only (meaning for only the time period that he was logged on to the computer) and offered that to the authorities instead. They declined and stated that the language of the subpoena was specific to the computer itself - so we complied.
The computer came back to us this week (hence being pertinent to a timely post) and was wiped clean by all parties involved. But the question remains - did we protect, to the best of our ability, the privacy of the other patrons who used that particular unit, that particular day prior to the incident?
If you have made it this far into this particular blog, then you know that one of our public computers was taken from our building for an investigation into allegations of illegal Internet activity regarding minors....'nuff said.
Not too big of a deal at this point because the local authorities secured the proper paperwork to do so and it was all carried out in a fairly safe and secure manner. But one thing has been sticking with me throughout this whole process. Our public Internet computers do not erase the browsing history until just before midnight for each day that we are open. In order for this to happen, they have to be plugged into our network and basically they are cleared out (cache, cookies, passwords, all of that) and we start carte blanche every day. While there are very practical and technical reasons for this, part of it is also due to the fact that we do not monitor 'behavior' patterns of our patrons on the Internet.
Well...the computer in question was taken from us earlier this year and on the day of the incident, per our library procedures set in place to deal with this, I unplugged the computer from the network and powered it down. Meaning, it left the building before the'dump' (in the afternoon) and the browsing history of every other patron that used the computer prior to the individual who was busted was then made available to the local detectives. Part of what makes this tricky is that our IT department was informed and backed up the files for this individual in question only (meaning for only the time period that he was logged on to the computer) and offered that to the authorities instead. They declined and stated that the language of the subpoena was specific to the computer itself - so we complied.
The computer came back to us this week (hence being pertinent to a timely post) and was wiped clean by all parties involved. But the question remains - did we protect, to the best of our ability, the privacy of the other patrons who used that particular unit, that particular day prior to the incident?
Monday, January 25, 2010
Where privacy and IF collide...
This is tricky for me. It seems that the post 9/11 world has made privacy the new "black", if you will, especially now that we have FBI director Mueller testifying about thousands of phone numbers obtained through sketchy methods by his agents. I sort of ran into the same situation this week...
While working at the reference desk, I was approached by two women. One of them asked me if I had heard about the missing teenage girl who had supposedly ran away a few days ago (it was in the news apparently). I told her that I had not.
She then explained to me that she was the girl's stepmother and she wanted me to look into our "system" and she if she had been in the library to use the computer or check anything out. The pit in my stomach reached up and started to choke me right in front of them.
I got it together and told them how sorry I was and that this must be a difficult time for them and then went into a very surface level discussion of patron confidentiality based on the RCW and that I could not help them with their request. As you can imagine, the emotional tone of the conversation began to elevate. She then asked for the building manager, who happened to be me at that moment because it was the last hour that we were open and there were only two other part-time librarians and about 12 circ staff members in the building.
So we talked it out - I tried to talk it out anyway. Patron confidentiality is a very very serious issue in our library system, as with most other systems. While there was no way that I was going to do what she was asking me to do - you can imagine the internal conflict that was brewing inside of me as I placed myself in her position. I tried to find any wiggle room possible - asking her if she signed the application as the guardian (since the girl was under 17 when she got her card - per our system's policy). She had not.
Then she told me I was a murderer and would rather see a dead child than cough up a list of her daughter's library activity...
While working at the reference desk, I was approached by two women. One of them asked me if I had heard about the missing teenage girl who had supposedly ran away a few days ago (it was in the news apparently). I told her that I had not.
She then explained to me that she was the girl's stepmother and she wanted me to look into our "system" and she if she had been in the library to use the computer or check anything out. The pit in my stomach reached up and started to choke me right in front of them.
I got it together and told them how sorry I was and that this must be a difficult time for them and then went into a very surface level discussion of patron confidentiality based on the RCW and that I could not help them with their request. As you can imagine, the emotional tone of the conversation began to elevate. She then asked for the building manager, who happened to be me at that moment because it was the last hour that we were open and there were only two other part-time librarians and about 12 circ staff members in the building.
So we talked it out - I tried to talk it out anyway. Patron confidentiality is a very very serious issue in our library system, as with most other systems. While there was no way that I was going to do what she was asking me to do - you can imagine the internal conflict that was brewing inside of me as I placed myself in her position. I tried to find any wiggle room possible - asking her if she signed the application as the guardian (since the girl was under 17 when she got her card - per our system's policy). She had not.
Then she told me I was a murderer and would rather see a dead child than cough up a list of her daughter's library activity...
Sunday, January 17, 2010
What History?
Recently, I was asked to sit in on a review committee for a book that was being challenged in one of our libraries. The book was the graphic novel version of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. The formal complaint that was somewhat legitimate (the rest was a big, messy rant) was that it was too extreme in its socialist viewpoints and that the illustrations were to graphic and should be removed from the shelves.
Interesting....
So I put on my professional cap and enjoyed the 4 hours of paid time that I was given to read the title and respond to the complaint. After all the hooplah, my basic stance was that the library provides a forum for all opinions and political views and it is up to the patrons to make their own decisions. The title was located in one of the adult sections of the library, so I had no issue with the illustrations.
Looking back, I am not sure if that was me speaking or just the version of me that I wanted the patron who was going to read my recommendation to see. I am certain of what I decided about the title because I am certain about the principles that guide me as a librarian and it fell in line with the instruction that we have received.
A bit more direct application can be seen here
I was the librarian who "busted" this individual. I was the librarian who testified in court as to the images that I saw on his computer. I called 911. I called our executive director and attorney. I watched as the computer was taken out of the library after the proper court order had been secured and any other information regarding any other patrons who had used that computer that day was secured as well.
I don't think that there is a lot of instruction that can prepare you to deal with this type of situation. We do NOT monitor computer use. It was pure happenstance and I was helping a patron next to this individual when I unintentionally noticed the images on the screen.
For me, these two situations are what make the principle of intellectual freedom so extraordinary and dynamic - does an individual lose his right to privacy in a public space when he/she violates certain laws? The questions could flow forever and I will be the first person to defend an individual's right to privacy in the library, but this situation has me thinking.....where is that line?
Interesting....
So I put on my professional cap and enjoyed the 4 hours of paid time that I was given to read the title and respond to the complaint. After all the hooplah, my basic stance was that the library provides a forum for all opinions and political views and it is up to the patrons to make their own decisions. The title was located in one of the adult sections of the library, so I had no issue with the illustrations.
Looking back, I am not sure if that was me speaking or just the version of me that I wanted the patron who was going to read my recommendation to see. I am certain of what I decided about the title because I am certain about the principles that guide me as a librarian and it fell in line with the instruction that we have received.
A bit more direct application can be seen here
I was the librarian who "busted" this individual. I was the librarian who testified in court as to the images that I saw on his computer. I called 911. I called our executive director and attorney. I watched as the computer was taken out of the library after the proper court order had been secured and any other information regarding any other patrons who had used that computer that day was secured as well.
I don't think that there is a lot of instruction that can prepare you to deal with this type of situation. We do NOT monitor computer use. It was pure happenstance and I was helping a patron next to this individual when I unintentionally noticed the images on the screen.
For me, these two situations are what make the principle of intellectual freedom so extraordinary and dynamic - does an individual lose his right to privacy in a public space when he/she violates certain laws? The questions could flow forever and I will be the first person to defend an individual's right to privacy in the library, but this situation has me thinking.....where is that line?
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