“The Evolution of Privacy within the American Library Association 1906-2002” by Steve Witt.
- Erin Andreassi
- Mar 13, 2022
- 3 min read
Image by Patrick Robert Doyle on Unsplash
In this article, Witt provides a historical overview of the evolving concept of privacy as a protected value in the American library profession. Within this overview, Witt positions the American public library as a space that was traditionally under surveillance due to the political concerns over what patrons were reading. More specifically, the establishment of patron policy as a professional obligation evolved in response to media perception of public libraries as spaces in which youth patrons develop their political identities as anarchists or terrorists. Additionally, library professionals created a Code of Ethics to include the value of confidentiality with the hopes of placing their profession at the same level of prestige as the medical and legal professions.
1906: A nineteen-year-old immigrant and suspected anarchist, Henry Melnek, was arrested for stealing two books from the Astor Library in New York. This incident was significant because it affected the public’s perception of libraries as spaces that provide anarchist materials at a time when there was a global fear of “anarchism” that included any organized anticapitalistic and antigovernment movements. While there was general distrust in libraries at this time, libraries had also clearly not devised a system to protect their patrons’ privacy.
1919: News broke out of another young person who was deported for his political ideology. This person testified that “he got his anarchist education at the New York Public Library,” deepening negative public perception of the library.
1922: Charles Bolton wrote “The Ethics of Librarianship” comparing librarianship to other professions, like law and medicine, which are also guided by established ethics. The development of a code and the notions of "harm" that could be produced by a lack of ethics was established more to defend the legitimacy of librarianship as a professional class than to defend rights to privacy.
Mid-1930s: Amidst the Great Depression, efforts continued to establish a Code of Ethics to bolster the status of the library profession as the number of professional library positions declined.
Late 1930s: The legal right to privacy in the United States developed as a delayed response to Warren and Brandeis’s 1890 law-review article, The Right to Privacy, which argues that people have the right to be “left alone.”
1939: Privacy and confidentiality was coded as a professional standard in American libraries.
1970: There was a huge spike in the discussion of privacy in the library profession when the IRS investigated patrons’ borrowing records related to bomb-making. Judith Krug and James Harvey also published an article about the federal government conducting unwarranted investigations into patron records and called on librarians to strengthen privacy standards in the profession.
1991: Librarians advocated against the FBI’s surveillance of access to technical materials by patrons from the Soviet Union in New York libraries.
2001-2002: Librarians discussed privacy in reaction to the passage of the USA Patriot Act.
Lesson Idea:
Before assigning this reading, ask your students to write why they think privacy is important in libraries. After assigning this reading, ask your students to review what they wrote to see if any of the following themes were mentioned:
anti-immigration
fear of anti-capitalist or anti-government political positions
defending the library profession as an elite profession
Then, ask students why they personally think privacy is important or not important to protect in libraries, and why.
Questions for Librarians:
How does Witt’s overview provide greater insight into current events related to privacy in the library profession?
Consider the evolution of the ALA’s Code of Ethics as a method of defending the prestige of the library profession to be on par with the medical and legal professions. What are the pros and cons in doing so? How does the value of privacy in the library profession compare to the value of privacy in the medical or legal professions?
Tip: converse with your colleagues in the medical librarianship field or law librarianship field to gather their perspectives on this topic.
Witt, Steve. “The Evolution of Privacy within the American Library Association 1906-2002.”
Library Trends 65, no. 4 (2017): 639-658. Accessed March 13, 2022.
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