Fulfillment Borrowing history: allow users to choose to opt in
Currently the library can turn borrowing history on or off, but the choice applies to all users. For privacy reasons, and in order to avoid subpoena situations, we have it off, but some users do want borrowing history on as a convenience, and are not concerned about privacy risk themsleves. Why not allow those users to opt in to borrowing history, and allow the default otherwise to being off?
By the way, this "opt in" approach is how most public libraries in Eastern Massachusetts are set up, so our users expect this level of service from us also.
It is hard to explain that we leave borrowing history off because in our system turning it on exposes all our borrowers to a privacy risk. When users can't make this personal choice and control their own privacy settings at the university the way they can in their local cities and towns, it makes our library and our online system appear very "web 1.0".
Karen Merguerian
shared this idea
4 comments
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Gro Heidi Ramunddal
commented
I Agree. Most (probably all?) Norwegian public libraries have this option and users expect the same functionality from us!
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Gabriele Höfler
commented
It has been almost two years since this idea was shared, but I wanted to point out that with the GDPR in force this has become more interesting for European libraries.
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Secret Shopper
commented
This job also runs at the institutional level and cannot be run on a per library basis. At institutions where an LMS is shared among autonomous self-managing libraries with differing policies regarding anonymization this WILL pose a problem.
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Karen Merguerian
commented
To clarify, this is related to the decision to anonymize borrowing data. If the library decides to anonymize, it denies individual users the ability to choose to keep their borrowing history.