Confidentiality Policies and Procedures of the Reference Departments in Texas Academic Libraries.
Libraries are commonly viewed as "sanctuaries of ideas," and librarians are seen as the guardians of ideas and of the records the library and its users generate.1 Librarians are also viewed as researchers of reference questions and topics. As fa cilitators of research and keepers of rec ords, they have access to certain information about the users of the li brary?information that may be consid ered private. Lin owes and Hoyman note that librarians create records and collect
Privacy and Library 2.0: How Do They Conflict?
Library 2.0 has a great potential to provide customized services to patrons. However some librarians are concerned that the information needed to provide these services may have a detrimental effect on privacy. How are librarians dealing with this potential conflict?
Social Science Archives and Confidentiality
ances. Legally, regarding privileged communication, social scientists occupy a status more akin to journalists than to physicians, attorneys, or religious counsellors. That is, the right and obligation to protect sources is legally ambiguous (Carroll and Knerr, 1975). But the political and ethical necessity is nonetheless a matter of importance to the scholarly community. Storage and dissemination of social data in machine-readable form does not affect the ethical or moral nature of that obligation. But such storage and dissemination does raise technical and policy considerations not customarily of concern, for example, to the physician or journalist. The obligation to honor assurances of confidentiality-both as a matter of self-interest among social scientists and as a matter of ethical