Laurabelle's Blog

Today I went neither to class nor to work but to the PLA National Conference, which was in downtown Seattle. I picked up lots of free books, spent money on three others, and went to three fairly interesting sessions. I won't say that I was as excited about the whole thing as I was at the ASIS&T conference in the fall, but it was okay. I'm glad I went, if only because I would have regretted missing it, but I don't feel that I'm missing anything by not going back tomorrow or Saturday.

The most controversial session I went to was about the Patriot Act. Obviously people have very extreme opinions, and it was kind of interesting to see the FBI officer defending his agency and the library attorney telling us what we should do to protect our patrons against invasions of their privacy.

The other day, a KCLS patron emailed in and requested Amazon-like features for iPac (the web catalog), such as people who checked out this author’s work also checked out these other authors. Now, of course we can’t do that right now because it’s not one of the features available in iPac, but the question got me thinking about all the reasons why one wouldn’t want to do something like that in a library system. All I said to the patron at first was that it was contrary to KCLS’ privacy policy. He wrote back, asking if it were possible to remove the patron data, so that privacy wouldn’t be violated. Since he asked, and since he referred to the so-called Patriot act, I decided it was probably safe to talk to him honestly.