MichaelZimmer.org

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 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, [...]

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 [...]

Hannah Yale, and art student here at UW-Milwaukee, has created an amazing gurellia art project, in collaboration with the UWM Library, called “The Original Google Project.” Here’s the description from its Facebook page: This project was designed as a collaboration with the UWM Library as an awareness effort for the use of library resources over [...]

This week I received a formal reply to my July 2 letter to the Shorewood, Wisconsin Public Library regarding its requiring I provide my social security number to obtain a library card, that confirms the anecdotal evidence that the library might have changed its policy and/or procedures in this regard: Michael Zimmer, PhD Assistant Professor [...]

Blogging has been extremely light as I’m in the process of relocating to Milwaukee. To that end, I recently visited my local community’s public library to sign up for a card, and was shocked to see that they required me to divulge my social security number in order to obtain a library account. I’ve sent [...]