MichaelZimmer.org

I’m again thrilled to be contributing to an American Library Association (ALA) webinar on generating issues and ideas for programming during the upcoming Choose Privacy Week. Details and my slides are below: The free, hour-long online webinar will take place on from 1 p.m. – 2 p.m. Central Time on Tuesday, April 9 and will feature four [...]

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an excellent article by Marc Parry on “As Libraries Go Digital, Sharing of Data Is at Odds With Tradition of Privacy,” noting that as libraries are beginning to collect and share patron data to build tools for recommending and discovering books, important concerns over patron privacy emerge, which [...]

In celebration of Choose Privacy Week, the American Library Association‘s Office for Intellectual Freedom has released preliminary findings from a new survey on “Librarian Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Informational Privacy” that I conducted on their behalf with generous support from the Open Society Foundation. The press release with preliminary results is copied below; the full report [...]

With generous support from the Open Society Foundation, I’ve been working with the American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom to help assess privacy attitudes and practices of librarians and related information professionals, and we just launched our first survey for librarians.

I am currently in New Orleans for the American Library Association Annual Conference and Exhibition, where I will be speaking on the program “Promoting Ethical Literacy in Youth: How Librarians Can Partner with Parents and Teachers”, hosted by the ALA’s Committee on Professional Ethics and the Office of Intellectual Freedom. I am lucky to be [...]

I recently attended the 9th annual Information Ethics Roundtable hosted by the University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science. This year’s theme was “Human Rights as Information Rights,”and featured a great collection of papers. I presented a paper co-written with three of my esteemed colleagues, Johannes Britz, Peter Lor, and Shana Ponelis, [...]

Building from the successful event on Minding the Gaps: WikiLeaks and Internet Security in the 21st Century held at UW-Milwaukee, I will be joining my colleague Dr. Joyce Latham to discuss Intellectual Freedom vs. WikiLeaks at the Brookfield Public Library on Thursday, February 24th from 7 to 8 PM. Registration for this event is requested, [...]

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information Studies has recently been awarded a large IMLS grant to support six new PhD students pursuing research in overcoming barriers to information access. Details here and here, and below: Overcoming Barriers to Information Access (B2A): Educating the Next Generation of Library and Information Science Leaders Doctoral Fellowships Funded [...]

I have a summer research opportunity for an incoming UW-Milwaukee freshman interested in libraries, Web 2.0, and information ethics and policy. The Office of Undergraduate Research is again sponsoring the UR@UWM Summer Research program. Selected students are invited to campus for four weeks during the summer (July 12-August 6) to engage in cutting edge research [...]

From May 2 through May 8, 2010, libraries across the nation will celebrate Choose Privacy Week for the first time. This American Library Association campaign invites library professionals, users, and friends into a national conversation about privacy rights in a digital age. The UWM School of Information Studies and UWM Libraries have joined together to [...]