I interviewed an academic systems librarian. The primary interview was done via email, but we also discussed in person some of the other topics that were chosen by others in the class and some of the situations in previous discussion board assignments. The in person part was more of an informal conversation than the rest of the interview and went on for quite a while, so I don’t have detailed notes for those, nor did I include them in my interview script and answers.

The three main ethical problems they found in their area of librarianship were 1) administrations/administrators who were more interested in the business performance of the library over its role in teaching and scholarship; 2) the lack of a digital archival medium and over-enthusiasm of libraries to dispose of physical archival materials after digitization; and 3) the trend towards seeing library patrons as “information consumers” over scholars and promoting research.

The ethical gray area they experienced was in the “other duties as assigned,” as many are probably familiar from their own duties or in job listings. They described a supervisor who assigned tasks that were the responsibility of other departments outside the library, without consultation of the personnel in those departments. This caused conflict between personnel and contributed to low morale and loss of goodwill between different areas of the university. They said that respecting the boundaries of each position and department is just as important as other duties as assigned for the good of the institution. This I found very interesting, as I did not consider it to be something that happened in professional level jobs. I have experienced it in lower-level positions in the retail and service sectors, where a manager higher than my supervisor would “poach” myself and my coworkers to work in completely different departments. This was frustrating to us, as we were completely unfamiliar with the policies of those departments and created a lot of resentment between department heads, which then flowed downwards, affecting lower level employees and customers/visitors.

We spoke a long time on the three main ethical problems they described, especially the move towards commercialization and business focus at the cost of scholarly pursuits and the arts and humanities. I was surprised that they said they’d never heard the ALA Code of Ethics discussed in any academic library setting, which shows it’s important to make that available.

Two questions I asked specifically in my interview were about issues of patron privacy, specifically requests by law enforcement for patron records and what the library does to protect patron privacy. I found their answer really important because it describes something that I hadn’t thought of about security.

They said: “For ethical reasons, we choose to anonymize closed loan records nightly so as to minimize patron exposure to unconstitutional or criminal exploitation of their data….Also, we have scrupulously excluded any positively identifying and therefore sensitive information (like Social Security Number) from any patron record that the library handles. This is crucial. Library systems and University systems in general are simply not secure enough to trust with personally identifying information. So I think national higher education privacy standards dictate that we not store it there.”

Though it wasn’t in the interview script (this was part of the in-person discussion), we also spent some time discussing the problems of librarians reaching populations who are from areas with high levels of violence and oppression by the state against the people. They said this was something they had experience with in previous positions. Because librarians are considered public servants, it can be difficult to convince people in those populations that the library is a safe place and librarians can be trusted to protect patron privacy. This is one of the reasons it’s important to resist federal, state, and local pressures to access patron records and other sensitive data.

All in all, it was a very fun interview.