Sutherland Shire Libraries Staff News

In thinking about what I'd like in any new library system my mind turned to some of the social features that I think would improve the user experience of library catalogues - borrower history, tagging, commenting, etc. But to do these things you need to start collecting data about who borrows what, which inevitably leads to discussions about user privacy and the security of that data (leaving aside for a moment the issue of storage space).

This reminded me of an excellent blog post I recently read on Library Garden, What Libraries Can Learn from Facebook. The discussion in the comments on this post is lively with people on both sides of the fence putting forward their viewpoint.

Here's a bit:

We all know that people (myself, and probably you included) will share personal information in exchange for a quality experience. We share personal renting and buying habits in exchange for Netflix and Amazon recommendations. We share personal reading habits on GoodReads and LibraryThing to connect with others who share our interests and tastes...

and then:

We know all this, and we personally experience the benefits, but librarians still seem generally loathe to let our customers share their personal information in exchange for anything. We don't just protect customer privacy, we paternalistically protect it from the customers themselves, rendering them childlike. Our privacy philosophy often reduces down to, "We know better", or
"You can't be trusted with that--you'll hurt yourself."

I'm definitately on the side of letting users choose to opt in to share their data in order to improve their experience of the Library. I've just heard people ask me on the enquiry desk whether we keep a record of what they have borrowed too many times for me to think the bulk of users would be worried about sharing this type of data.

I've posted about an interview with Beth Jefferson, founder of Bibliocommons, that I've just listened to. Bibliocommons is social discovery software for library catalogues. It allows library patrons to tag, review and link items in the library collection and share that data with others. It's a way of making library catalogues work better as discovery tools. Bibliocommons was developed with the cooperation of Sirsi Dynix and so it works with their products (as well as a few other vendors currently).

Rather than recreate the whole post just read it on the RISG blog if you're interested and maybe check out the interview.