Library privacy in practice: system change and challenges

Libraries have an historical commitment to defending patrons’ right to privacy as a means of safeguarding access to knowledge, free expression, and intellectual freedom. Much has been written, in popular and scholarly form, about the professional ethic of privacy in the library field. A considerable amount of this history traces the ethic’s origins to the American Library Association and the group’s establishment of a professional code that explicitly defends patron privacy. This code provides guiding norms and values for the librarian and library institution to protect the flow of patron data; for example, protecting book-borrowing history that might reveal personal and political preferences, guard against government surveillance, and support intellectual freedom.