Privacy and Security for Today's Library

Libraries don't always need to hire a consultant to review the level of facility security. Using a structured assessment process, librarians can create a report that will help to make their building, staff, and patrons safer.

The current technological and political landscapes have re-ignited conversations and concerns around digital security, privacy, and media literacy. To build a foundation for meaningful and sustainable programs that support the development of broad-based technological, media, and data literacies, a cross-departmental team of NCSU Librarians investigated what digital privacy means to students through user research and short-form pop-up programs.

Branded as “Digital Life Decoded,” this project is grounded in substantial user research done in the spring of 2017 that identified three specific issues that students were concerned about: hacking of personal information, consent for use of information, and understanding how their information would be shared.

This presentation will cover the process of development, including user research methods and project management, and the 3 interactive activities from pop-up programs. In addition to sharing methods and lesson learned, this presentation aims to heighten the conversation about our professional and personal roles in leading cybersecurity and privacy.

The pace of changes in teaching and learning is becoming impossible to sustain: equipment evolves in an accelerated pace, the methodology of teaching and learning cannot catch up with the equipment changes and atop, there are constant content updates. In an ever-shrinking budget, faculty, students and IT staff barely can address the issues above, and have less time and energy left to address the increasing concerns about privacy and security. And with the unprecedented amount of applications for desktop and mobile devices, it is difficult to constrain faculty and students to use campus IT sanctioned applications instead of those of their own choice, exposing faculty, students, and the campus, at risk. What is the balance between safeguarding privacy on campus and fostering security without stifling innovation and creativity? Can the library be the campus hub for education about privacy and security?

In this session, we’ll discuss and form an opinion about the education-pertinent issues of privacy and security from the broad campus perspective, versus the narrow library one. We'll discuss and form an opinion about the role of the library on campus in terms of the greater issues of privacy and security, and we’ll re-examine the thin red line of the balance between standardization and innovation; between the need for security and privacy protection and the freedom for creativity and exploration.

Bill Marden talks about how he and his colleagues at New York Public Library (NYPL) managed to research, plan, write, and execute a new Privacy Policy for NYPL....all in less than a year. As Michelangelo said, "If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius."

This presentation will discuss privacy, stigma, and the public gaze as a source of concern and trauma for people with disabilities. People with disabilities, especially visible disabilities, often face constant public scrutiny of their bodies and ways of being.  Many people with disabilities are chronically unemployed or under employed and use libraries for services.  A major concern for people with disabilities, especially students, is having a private place to study or work where they are out of the public eye.

This session provides an updated overview of an article the presenter co-authored in 2016 from the Code4Lib Journal titled, "Measuring Library Vendor Cyber Security: Seven Easy Questions Every Librarian Can Ask," which was also presented at the Internet Librarian 2016 conference in Monterey, CA last year.

In this session, Ronald Russ, Arkansas Library Association (ArLA) Web Services Committee Chair, will discuss how the ArLA website was hacked by a group in Eastern Europe, and how that information was sold to ISIS. He will go into details as to what happened, what went wrong, and what ArLA learned from the incident.

In this session, we'll discuss both practical and theoretical ways of protecting librarians and their patrons in a world of social engineering, hacking, and malicious states. Whether it’s email, browsing history, or your texts, we’ll cover what you can do to keep yourself private.

In an age of broad government surveillance, Big Data, high profile data hacks, and new digital threats that come from a dangerous and uncertain political climate, it's easy to feel like privacy is a relic of pre-digital times. But what about those of us who are unwilling to sacrifice this basic human right for the convenience of new technologies and the empty promise of national security? Privacy activist Alison Macrina of the Library Freedom Project will discuss what we librarians can do to protect our patrons, especially those most marginalized and most at-risk by the loss of privacy. She will cover the landscape of privacy threats and discuss what technical tools we can use and teach our patrons to take control of their digital lives in these extraordinary times.

Learn about contemporary patron privacy issues facing libraries today, and the practical actions libraries can take to improve patron privacy protections. This session will provide an overview of the ethical and legal foundations for patron privacy, and highlight resources that can be used to help libraries preserve patron privacy when adopting new technologies. Topics to be addressed include vendor agreements, securing the library's ILS, and using encryption tools to safeguard web browsing and online communications.