I’m very sorry I had to leave the Annual Meeting early; I know doing so is disruptive and rather rude. I had an important matter to look after at home.

I did want to share my thoughts on the situation with the bylaws. I fully acknowledge that figuring out how to govern 70K+ people (if we include GHC workers who for whatever reason are not GHC members) over a broad geography in a fully transparent and democratic manner is quite difficult. So are organizational growing pains.

My sense is that GHC leadership has gone about solving this problem with a disappointingly stonewalled mindset, however. The right questions here are “how do we communicate clearly, honestly, and transparently? how do we invite and reward member and worker participation in governance, excluding as few as we possibly can?”

What it looks like to me right now is that the GHC board instead asked “How do we change how we work as little as possible while maintaining a Potemkin façade of transparency and democracy?” You’ve been quite successful at that, I must say, at a significant cost in diminished trust in several sectors of your membership.

You should be transparent about what you’re paying your lawyers. You should have involved the membership in the bylaws changes from the outset. You should have accepted [South Central Federation of Labor president] Kevin Gundlach’s offer of consulting. In my union local, the bylaws require an agenda ONE FULL WEEK in advance of any membership meeting — honestly you should be embarrassed by only producing one the day of. And, of course, you should recognize the original bargaining unit voluntarily.

It’s clear to me that I have a choice in my health care. I can choose merciless corporate beancounters, or I can choose merciless corporate beancounters who falsely and hypocritically claim to be member-driven. This October, I know what I will be choosing, and it won’t be GHC. This has nothing to do with your workers, who helped save my life coming up on three years ago, and everything to do with the Board’s behavior.

You won’t change until your numbers drop? Fine. I’ll see what I can do to make that happen.

Dorothea Salo
GHC member {number redacted}

(Hot tip: Michigan has the most up-to-date state library-privacy law around, updated in 2021. Learned that at PLA.)

One question I got yesterday both broke my heart and (afterwards) made me wish I’d had more time to think it over. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a librarian with strong privacy ethics works for a library director who’s gaga for “patron insights” (which is dataveillance, let’s not mince words, dataveillance is what that is). What to do?

I have better suggestions today, I think, than I did yesterday. I will repeat something that both Sarah and I said, though, and that’s “don’t burn yourself out or martyr yourself.” Keep your director sweet, keep your job. Patrons need you and the field needs you, okay?

Choosing your battles

You can’t dislodge your boss’s latest obsession, even if it’s something as loathsome as intentional dataveillance of patrons. So don’t try. Instead, look around for what you can do.

Can you talk to IT about getting ad/tracker blockers into the library’s standard computer image? Defaulting browser search away from Google? Those are substantial wins, and most library bosses won’t care! Can you invite a speaker to talk about Big Tech detoxing (ahem)?

It’s just so easy to get discouraged when what you most want to do is what you can’t possibly do. (Remember, I come out of scholarly communication. I know all about getting discouraged by my own coworkers and reporting chain.) The only winning move is to turn away and look for other possibilities.

Allies, allies, allies

Your boss won’t listen to you. (I don’t know if this is just a library thing, but it sure is a library thing.) Your boss will listen to the library board. Your boss will listen to a critical mass of parents. Your boss will listen hard to local media.

So figure out how to get privacy in front of them and get an assist from them.

Playing the assessment card

After “Data Ethics in Library Learning Analytics” got rejected, I revised it for resubmission elsewhere, as you do. It was then, I believe, that Abigail Goben asked me whether the libraries in my sample had seen any tangible benefits from their surveillance work, since “more resources for the library!” was the Library Value Agenda’s big promise.

Well, dang. I hadn’t thought to look. And that sure was an important question.

So I went back through my entire stack of documents and I looked. And (spoilers for the article) I found basically bupkis. A bare handful of intangible benefits, not a single claim of added resources. And that became probably the strongest argument in that entire paper! That’s the power of assessment. It’s the power to call the emperor naked.

So when your boss is salivating over something shiny but gross, play the assessment card. How will the library know this thing is working? What are our expectations for it? If it doesn’t meet them, when and how do we bail out of it? You sound responsible rather than oppositional, and when the thing doesn’t work (because surveillance things rarely do), you can argue for pulling the plug, not least because your boss will likely have found a new shiny useless thing by then anyway. Here’s hoping it’s less unethical.

Calling in the heavies

Look. If you’re reading this and resonating with it, I can pretty much guarantee that I am in a far better-protected position than you. I’ve been in my job fifteen years (I know, shut up), I’ve been promoted as far as I can be without going into administration (which I have less than zero desire to do), and believe it or not, I’m reasonably well-understood and well-liked where I am. Nobody’s favorite, but safe enough.

So the person who calls it like it is with your boss should be me, not you. Will I do it? Heck yeah. Get me invited to whatever library-director shindig your boss goes to. I will call the whole boiling of them out. I’ve done it before. They can’t do anything to me, and nothing will stick to you.

You can also do this by proxy. You saw this presentation from ALA OIF the other day, really engaging speaker (I get that one a lot for whatever reason), perhaps boss would like it too, here’s the link to the recording. All-staff lists are also great for this—at that point your boss can’t even feel targeted.

Basically, deflect bossly aggro onto consultants like Becky Yoose and speakers like me. We can take it.

In these times, I have to make clear my generative-AI-refusenik stance on my syllabi. I don’t believe in unexplained blanket prohibitions; it really is on me to lay out why I ask what I do. The thing is, in the other classes I’m currently responsible for, it’s easy for me to point out that generative AI is quite likely to make up total whoppers about the subject matter. That’s less easy for me to assert in a class with this nebulous and wide-ranging a purview.

Here’s what I’ve got so far; it comes after the boilerplate “no generative AI, no way, no day” from campus. If any of it is useful to you, please use it; I need neither remuneration nor credit.

We’ll discuss this policy at some length in class, but a major reason I adopt it is that I want to talk with and listen to you, not a jumped-up pile of bullshit¹-emitting dice. Your voice matters. Your thoughts matter. Your intellectual development matters, especially now, so I don’t want you trying to outsource it!

A second reason is that much chatbot use in academic contexts stems from fear: fear of looking ignorant or foolish, or fear of one’s own work looking bad next to a classmate’s bullshit-machine² output. I don’t want you to be afraid of me, of each other, or of the work we will do in this class! Imperfection is expected and okay. Confusion is expected and okay; ask questions of me and your peers, not the bullshit machines. Not needing to fear your classmates’ bullshit-machine use is why I impose the academic-misconduct penalty; for a few (and it is only a few) students, penalties are all that will dissuade them. (If you are one of those students, please drop my class!)

A third reason is that chatbots are participants in the current commercial-surveillance state; ChatGPT, for example, retains all prompts it receives (though I believe it has ceased requiring personal information upfront). I do my best not to force my students into oversurveilled environments. Chatbots are easy for me not to force students into.

In return, I happily and sincerely pledge to you that I will not knowingly use any generative AI tools to build or teach this course, and I will not knowingly assign AI-generated content. If you see something you believe to be AI-generated, please point it out to me — my AI-dar, though fairly well-trained, is not infallible.

1. Hicks, M.T., Humphries, J. & Slater, J. “ChatGPT is bullshit.” Ethics in Information Technology 26, 38 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
2. Bergstrom, C.T., & West, J.D. “Modern-day oracles or bullshit machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world.” https://thebullshitmachines.com/

Here’s what I’d add [to our school’s career toolkit], based on serving on several search committees and reading a lot of student cover letters.

Do:

• Remember that this is about THEM, only secondarily about you. They’re hiring to solve problems and fill organizational gaps, and they’re in the driver’s seat here. The goal of a cover letter is to demonstrate that you will solve their problems and fill their organization’s gaps. Anything that’s more about “why you want the job” than “why you will be awesome at the job” will not help you get the job.
  • This often comes up in the first sentence of a cover letter, which I understand! Openings are extra hard! But try something like this: “I was pleased to see your {job title} position {wherever you saw it; they want to know this and it’s polite to tell them} because {something that matches you to a key point in the job ad}.” E.g. for a web librarianship position, “I was pleased to see your Web Librarian position advertised on the code4lib website, because I want to continue building usable and fully accessible websites for library patrons.” You just told them that you have experience building library websites in the very first sentence of your letter — that’s huge.
• Show, don’t tell. And be specific. Think in terms of stories and outcomes. You can say you have great organizational skills… or you can tell a story that demonstrates how amazing your organizational skills are, or how they made things better (“outcome“) for the organization and its patrons. Guess which is more persuasive?
  • You’ll also need those stories and outcomes for job interviews. Write down any you can think of right now, and add to your list as you do more classwork and gain more experience.
  • These don’t have to come strictly from work! Student-org experiences, volunteer experiences, experiential learning (that is, real-world class projects), and similar definitely count too.
  • A pattern to consider: “My experience {doing a thing you did}, which led to {nice outcome; quantified is a bonus} fits me to do {thing listed in job ad} in your library/archives.” The whole letter shouldn’t be a bunch of these, but one or two aimed at major job duties in the job ad will help. Again, start writing down examples of it now, to plug in where it makes sense to!
• Be even more persnickety than usual about business-letter conventions. This is silly and shouldn’t matter, but there are still people in these professions who will downgrade an app for a comma instead of a colon after the cover-letter salutation.
• Try to sound like a person, not a chatbot or a robot. “Conversational and cordial” usually goes over well, as long as you don’t add too much purely-conversational fluff.
• I’ve historically had good luck (as applicant or recommender) by closing a letter with something like “I wish you the best as you fill this important position.” It’s gracious and doesn’t make inappropriate assumptions about who will get hired. People seem to take it well — hiring is stressful too, and hiring managers appreciate that you know that.

Do not:

• Call yourself “the best” or “an ideal” candidate. You don’t know that and it’s not for you to decide. This comes across as arrogant and entitled.
• Say that you love books (or “old books” or really any material objects you’ll be working with) or love history. This is the hoariest of unrealistic clichés about library and archives work, such that it will immediately get your application trashed. It’s a fatal error, an own goal, a disaster. Fortunately, it’s easy to avoid: just don’t do it.
• Say that you just got your library/archives degree. In fact, leaving graduation dates off your résumé is not the worst idea ever! (And definitely don’t include your GPA. That marks you as a professionally-unsocialized newbie. Employers do not care about your library-school GPA.)
  • Many employers will cross you off the list as unqualified if they notice you just graduated. Is this wrong? Of course. Will they still do it? Yep.
  • Garbage humans you do not ever want to work for will see your new degree and think “this one’s clueless and exploitable, let’s hire them!” (I wish I didn’t have war stories from MA/LIS graduates…)
  • If your cover letter makes you seem more experienced than you are, let it, as long as you’re not actually lying about anything.
  • That said, if you’re applying for MLS-requiring jobs before you graduate, you actually should put your anticipated graduation date in your résumé. Still shouldn’t go in your cover letter, though, because you shouldn’t…
• Mention that you have the library degree, even though that’s usually in the job requirements. It’s in your résumé; that’s enough. Reserve your cover letter for what makes you stand out from the crowd — and practically by definition, your degree doesn’t.
  • Caveat: It’s fine to mention something relevant to the job that you did while earning the degree. But the thing you did should be the focus, not the degree. E.g. “Helping open a new public library alongside the Ho-Chunk Nation as part of the UW-Madison iSchool’s Tribal Libraries, Archives, and Museums program gave me the skills and cultural competency to {do requirement from the job ad}” is totally completely 100% great!
  • Not great, because it doesn’t set you apart from other candidates: “I have my MA/LIS from UW-Madison’s iSchool.”
• Mention bog-standard white-collar/office skills, even if they’re listed in the job ad. Don’t talk about Microsoft Office or Google, for example; everyone assumes you know these, so putting them in a cover letter will make employers suspect you don’t have much else to say for yourself. Instead, focus on the library/archives-specific points in the ad.
• Regurgitate your résumé. Don’t just list the positions you’ve held — that’s in your résumé, so repeating it won’t help you! Instead, discuss what you accomplished in your roles, relating each accomplishment back to something in the job ad.
• Write in Old High Academese, or make a big deal of your specifically academic accomplishments (e.g. your thesis title). Most employers will consider Old High Academese stuck-up and weird, and they won’t care about your thesis (it doesn’t solve any problems or plug any organizational gaps for them!).
  • Even for academic libraries that tenure librarians/archivists, only mention your thesis in the cover letter if it’s obviously applicable to the job. You can mention your future research agenda, especially if the job ad asks about it, but leave the past on your résumé/CV unless you’re planning to continue working in the same research space.
  • Folks who already have a Ph.D are particularly prone to this. Please don’t do it. It will be read as you not understanding how libraries/archives work and what is expected of librarians/archivists. Or (worse) that you think you’re superior to merely librarianly/archivist-y expectations because you hold a Ph.D — this is an attitude all academic librarians and archivists have run into, and let me tell you, librarians and archivists with sense do not want to hire it.
  • Sometimes you can dazzle an academic library with your Ph.D, admitted — but in all honesty I have yet to see that work out well, for the applicant or for the library/archives.
• Gush. The words “passion” and “excitement” should not appear in a cover letter, nor any overwrought synonyms for them. This comes off to hiring committees and managers as someone with nothing to offer except performative excitement. At its worst (and oh, I have indeed seen this), this comes off as inauthentic or clueless — nobody’s that excited about a job. That’s not an impression you want to leave. “Calmly and groundedly enthusiastic” is the tone you’re going for.

Then Leo Lo’s “AI literacy in libraries” survey made the rounds this morning. I may have been partly responsible for ensuring that Dr. Lo’s IRB office is having a very interesting day. If I am, good—“don’t lie to your potential respondents” is pretty basic human-subjects research ethics, and Lo’s survey consent text sure did say respondents could skip whatever questions they wanted, and the actual survey sure did have a bunch of unskippable questions anyway. (My thanks to those who showed me screenshots; I’m not eligible to take the survey, as I’m not presently working as a librarian, so I couldn’t myself see beyond the consent screen.)

“Survey,” mind you, is being kind—it’s actually a push poll full of pro-AI bilge. Dr. Lo apparently can’t imagine that there are librarians who refuse to use generative AI, to the point that his survey does not even allow them to say so.

I might be feeling a little bit broken about all this, folks. And what do I do when I’m feeling broken? I filk. So here we go. It’s CC0. Oh, and I have some peer-review time open, if any journals in my various wheelhouses with decent ethics policies want to hit me up.

Leo Lo
Is Leo Lo

That Leo Lo
That Leo Lo!
I do not like
that Leo Lo!

Do you use
gen AI, yo?

I do not use it,
Leo Lo.
I do not use
gen AI, though.

Do you use it
Here or there?

I do not use it
here or there.
I do not use it
anywhere!
I do not use
gen AI, yo!
I do not use it,
Leo Lo!

Do you use it
in a bog?
Do you use it
to catalog?

I do not use it
in a bog.
I do not use it
to catalog.
I do not use it
here or there.
I do not use it
anywhere!
I do not use gen AI, yo!
I do not use it, Leo Lo.

Do you use it
on the floor?
Do you use it
for Dublin Core?

Not on the floor.
Not for Dublin Core.
Not in a bog.
Not to catalog.
I do not use it here or there.
I do not use it anywhere!
I do not use gen AI, yo!
I do not use it, Leo Lo.

Do you? Will you?
at the desk?
Use it! Use it!
I insist.

I do not,
will not,
at the desk.

You must use it.
You will see.
You must use it
to write policy!

I do not use it for policy.
Why can’t you see?! Lo, let me be.

I do not use it in a bog.
I do not use it to catalog.
I do not use it on the floor.
I do not use it for Dublin Core.
I do not use it here or there.
I do not use it anywhere.
I do not use gen AI, yo!
I do not use it, Leo Lo!

A train! A teach!
A teach! A train!
Do you, will you
to do a train?

Not for a train! Not for policy!
Not on a committee! Lo! Let me be!
I do not, will not, in a bog.
I will not, do not, on the floor.
I do not use it to catalog.
I do not use it for Dublin Core.
I do not use it here or there.
I do not use it anywhere.
I do not use it, Leo Lo.

Say!
Your website?
On your website!
Do you, will you, on your site?

I do not, will not,
on the site.

Do you, will you,
in email?

I do not, will not, in email.
Not on the site. Not for a train,
Not for committee. Not for policy.
I do not use it, Lo, you see.
Not on the floor. Not for Dublin Core.
Not in a bog. Not to catalog.
I will not use it here or there.
I do not use it anywhere!

You do not use
gen AI, though?

I do not
use it,
Leo Lo.

Do you, will you,
on a Zoom?

I do not,
will not
on a Zoom!

Would you, could you,
given the boom?

I do not, will not, not this boom.
I will not, do not, on a Zoom.
I do not use it in email.
I do not use it for a train.
Not on the desk! Not for policy!
Not on committee! You let me be!
I do not use it in a bog.
I do not use it on the floor.
I do not use it to catalog.
I do not use it for Dublin Core.
I do not use it here or there.
I do not use it ANYWHERE!

I do not like
gen AI, yo!
I do not use it,
Leo Lo.

You do not use it.
So you say.
Try it! Try it!
And you may.
Try it and you may I say.

Lo!
If you won’t let me be
I still won’t use it!
You will see.

Lo!
I hate gen AI, yo!
I still won’t use it, Leo Lo!
I won’t use it for ethics’ sake.
I won’t use it ’cos it eats lakes!
I won’t use it to spout bullshit
Or erase art. Or exploit gigs.
Or crush websites. Or wipe out work.
It is so bad, so bad, you jerk!

So I won’t use it in a bog.
I won’t use it to catalog.
I will not use it on the floor.
I won’t use it for Dublin Core.
I will not use it at the desk.
I won’t use it for policy.
I will not use it for a train.
I will not use it in this boom.
I will not use it on a Zoom.
I will not use it in email.
I will not use it here or there,
I will not use it anywhere.

I have to hate
gen AI, though!
I still have ethics,
Leo Lo!

IFLA recently published a draft for comment of a Toolkit for Librarians and AI. The comment period is open through Wednesday, April 2; comments should be emailed to a.m.cox at sheffield.ac.uk and maria.debrasdefer at ifla.org.

To say that this thing is a hot mess is an insult to hot messes. I won’t fisk it here, because I fisked it fairly thoroughly in a copy I sent to them. (If you would like to borrow any of my language, or simply email IFLA to say that you endorse my remarks, please do feel free. I wasted a whole morning on that dumpster fire; no reason you should have to.) I will say that I find this document entirely typical of the feculent dross librarianship is putting out—including in its peer-reviewed literature—about machine learning and generative AI, and I am frankly appalled at how typical it is.

We are librarians. Librarians. We are supposed to be the ones who remain grounded in empirical evidence, who see through hype, who know where to find reliable information and who heed it once we find it. We are better than this pathetic exercise in brainless both-sides-ism. We need to be!

Which means we need to oppose the bullshit machines, which is what generative-AI-based chatbots are and as best I can tell always will be. Statistics is not reality, and the pretense that it is has already caused great harm and will cause more.

I expect librarians to distinguish the hopeful modals “may” “might” “could” “would” and “has potential to” from actual reality, which for generative AI paints a much less interesting and useful picture. I expect librarians to foreground ethics, not treat it as an inconvenient brake on shiny-chasing, and the ethics of generative AI—its known, documented, real-world, present-day harms—are simply abysmal. I expect librarians to seek truth, speak truth, and shy away from hollow both-sides-ing.

And finally, I expect librarians to oppose the bullshit machines. Everything we presently know about the bullshit machines—not assume, not predict, not guess, actually know—makes them something librarians must oppose.

IFLA did not do any of that here, more shame to IFLA. IFLA has done good work in the past—their stance on privacy is vastly better than ALA’s or ACRL’s, for example—and I certainly do hope they turn it around here.

The pilot will enable between 15-20 academic advisors in the Cross-College Advising Service to receive summary course data for students that have been assigned to them. The data will be pulled from Canvas and other integrated learning tools. Advisors will be able to view: 1) comparative performance in the course as reflected in Canvas (only if a student falls in the bottom quartile of performance as compared to peers) and, 2) participation in online course activities (only if a student is more than five days behind in participation as compared to peers). If a student meets either of these criteria in two or more enrolled courses, indicating a possible trend, the advisor assigned to the student will see an indicator suggesting a point of contact may be warranted. The advisor will only see course names of the courses for which these criteria are met, they will not see any additional details.

Translating that to English: if a student was in the bottom 25% of two or more courses, or was five days behind in two or more courses, with Canvas and other edtech tools as sole arbiter of either condition, that student would immediately be ratted out to their advisor.

What could possibly go wrong, after all? Well, for me, a few things jumped to mind immediately:

• What if “bottom quartile” is still totally fine? Isn’t this going to waste advisor time and scare the crap out of students who are earning perfectly acceptable grades? I’ve taught classes where “bottom quartile” students were earning As! Who on earth thought this would be a good measure?
• This disadvantages students with flexible-due-date disability accommodations, one of the commonest accommodations I run into. Yes, I can record extended due dates in Canvas, but in practice I pretty much never do, because it’s a pain in the rear and I’ve never had more than one or two students in this situation at a time, so I just remember what’s going on (with email as backstop, usually) and grade accordingly. This habit of mine (which is, I believe, pretty broadly shared), would absolutely land accommodated students in advisor offices at a considerably inflated rate compared to their peers. So very helpful and not discriminatory at all!
• What if the advisor is part of the problem? The advisors in my department are the best in the business, but let me tell you, I have stories of rotten advising from elsewhere on campus. Do I trust that every ratted-out student will be treated with compassion and dignity by their advisor? Do I trust that every advisor will investigate context and believe a student—or, for that matter, an instructor—over an inordinately clumsy Canvas measurement? Automation bias is a thing. I sure don’t trust all campus advisors to resist it.

And then there’s my allergic reaction to student and classroom surveillance generally. On reading that email I may have muttered “Stay the {censored} out of my classroom!” rather intensely under my breath. (I may also have yelled it out loud. If I did, I apologize to anyone in the vicinity of my office at the time.)

There was an email address for questions about the program. I emailed it. “I wish to opt my courses out of this practice, ideally permanently. How do I do so?” I asked. The response was (my paraphrase), “You can’t. Talk to the hand.” (I do, in hindsight, wonder whether a tenured faculty member would have received the same response as I, a mere non-tenure-track academic-staff instructor. If the LAVA people were sufficiently Machiavellian, perhaps they even selected for more precarious instructors as less likely to push back. I have no way to know.) That door sure had been well and truly slammed in my face.

All-righty then. I forwarded the email exchange to the catchall email for one of the campus newspapers, briefly explaining that I had concerns, and offering to be a named source. I had a return email from a student journalist the very next day, and less than two weeks later, this article resulted. Go read it. It’s damn good. It was everything I hoped it would be.

It wasn’t long after that that I was invited to, and attended, a coffee date with a major college dean. Being the librarian I am, I came prepared with a few incisive items from The Litrachoor about Cut It Out With The Grossly Unethical And Useless Surveillance Actually. I also turned on what little charm I have, and (allowing for decanal poker face) it was actually quite a pleasant conversation during which I felt heard, if not necessarily agreed-with. Which is fine; even I don’t always agree with me.

I wrote up this whole incident for my infosec class the subsequent spring, by way of illustrating inappropriate and harm-laden campus surveillance to my often too-trusting students. And there it stayed… until early this spring, when puzzled students let me know that my links to LAVA materials were broken.

Eh. Probably another website revamp, I said to myself, and investigated. But no! LAVA was sure enough dead, its documentation vanished. Its only current vestige is a description on this page, which I expect got missed and will disappear shortly. Here’s a screenshot, for when that happens:

It’s possible the pilot just ran its course, didn’t produce desired results, and was discontinued. I don’t think that’s the Occam’s Razor explanation, however, considering the suppression of the project documentation. I think this project was disappeared because the Daily Cardinal and I made it look very, very bad—every iota of as bad as it deserved to look, shoddy and peremptory as it was. I also adduce the considerable elaboration on the current page about stakeholder engagement and participatory design, the former of which was barely mentioned, and the latter not at all, in 2023 when LAVA launched.

If they’ve learned that they need to think of students (never mind instructors) as whole entire human beings with agency deserving of respect, not just laboratory guinea pigs? If they’ve learned that I am watching them and will not take their invasion into my classrooms lying down? Good.

I doubt this is over. I notice they’re getting into the student-dashboard business. I will eat every winter hat I have (and I live in Wisconsin; I have several) if part of their reasoning isn’t “throw the students a sop so they’ll let us get away with whatever other stunts we pull with their behavioral data exhaust.” I will be here if that happens, however, and I’m already inoculating my infosec students against it.

Moral of the story, relevant to much more than learning analytics: when we fight, sometimes we win.

I’m proud of this piece. It was a lot of work from start to finish, and I think I found out some important things that assessment and student-success folks, inside and outside libraries, need to be thinking about harder than they presently seem to be. ACRL also has a lot to answer for and an act to clean up. Here’s hoping that happens.

Three rounds of peer review means a lot of peer reviewers. Neither College and Research Libraries nor JLSC makes reviewers known to the author, so this is the only place I can say thank you, every single one of you—yes, even or perhaps especially the second-round reviewer who hated the piece and wasn’t shy about telling me so. You made this article better than I ever would have without you. I appreciate your time, your insight, your attention to detail (it was a last-round reviewer who caught the embarrassing citation problem), and your care.

I’m also grateful to JLSC editors, who shepherded this piece through a lot, including my nasty could-have-been-fatal illness a year ago that made me even harder to deal with than usual for me.

Cheers, and let’s keep talking about all this.

Exactly how they are doing it right:

• It’s opt-in. Every patron has to make an affirmative choice to risk their information privacy.
• It’s an easy opt-in, though (I looked at the opt-in page, though I did not myself opt in, because my threat model vis-a-vis those libraries is a bit different from most), which defends against charges of paternalism, as well as being the kind and good-user-experience thing to do. There’s even a history export, which is a nice balance between patron-friendly styles of data retention and letting patrons protect themselves, including from the library.
• The opt-in is as easy to reverse as it is to choose. (Same page, one click.) Wise and fair-minded and patron-protective.
• They’re clear on their straightforward no-nonsense documentation page about what they won’t do with retained data. If they stick to that (which is a moderate-size “if” given pressures around assessment and analytics, but until evidence to the contrary surfaces, I’ll believe them), I’m content.
• They’re also working from and disclosing a pretty clear threat model on that page. Breaches and The Man, basically, which is more or less accurate. (Because I am cynical and some folks in those libraries still loathe me, I would also add insider threat, but I can also see how “rogue librarian” wouldn’t be something they’d want to admit is a possibility.)

The only reservation I have, and it’s a small one, is whether there’s a panic button for cases of The Man asking for (or a rogue insider providing) a sneaky data dump. The way they have things set up, I think they’re thinking Wisconsin law protects retained circ data, and… maybe it does, but then again it’s a brutal information-privacy landscape right now such that maybe state law isn’t as protective as it should be. I’d want that panic button, myself, possibly tied to that exporter so that I could spirit the data away and perhaps restore it later when the hue and cry dies down. But that’s an internal matter that I (rightly) have no insight into.

My congratulations and deep appreciation to everybody involved in this. It’s excellent work, a model for how this should be done.

I managed to find, among many other curios, one of the first papers I wrote for library school back in 2003. I don’t recall the exact assignment prompt, but it appears to have been a challenge to define and assess “universal access to information.”

It’s… not a great paper, let’s just say that. I somehow managed to leave a sentence unfinished in the middle of it? Yikes? But it’s strikingly oracular as regards the issues and challenges I’ve built my career on, and the zinger quotient is definitely non-zero.

So what the hell. Here’s the paper; enjoy a quick glimpse at Past Me.