"Privacy and User Experience in 21st Century Library Discovery" by Shayna Pekala

Image by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

This article provides an overview of user experience and privacy in library discovery systems and the potential issues that have been created for libraries.

• Privacy has become an important issue with more advanced technologies for searching (p. 48).

• Users interact with discovery tools with the expectation that the library discovery technology will be synonymous with Google’s search engine (p. 49).

• There is a challenge to balance user needs for discovery and protect patron privacy as search engines like Google have drastically different privacy standards than the library has (p. 48).

• “The collection and sharing of user data that occurs on the open web is deeply troubling for libraries, whose professional ethics embody the values of privacy and intellectual freedom. A user’s search history contains information about a user’s thought process, and the monitoring of these thoughts inhibits intellectual inquiry (p. 49).”

• “Along the same lines, the ability to collect and analyze user data is extremely valuable to government agencies for surveillance purposes, creating an additional data-driven market (p.50).”

Questions for Librarians:

1. Based on your work experience, how does the similarities and differences between the library discovery system and Google search engine affect patron interactions? Do patrons expect the library discovery system to perform like Google’s search engine does?

2. Outside of one-shot and information sessions, in what ways can you introduce patrons to patron data privacy? How can the library make this information more findable in its work and resources?

Pekala. (2017). Privacy and User Experience in 21st Century Library Discovery. Information

Technology and Libraries, 36(2), 48–58. https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v36i2.9817