Building a Culture of Privacy through Collaborative Policy Development

Plenty of resources exist for understanding and protecting patron privacy in libraries. So too does governmental pressure, particularly for institutions subject to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or similar US state laws. While at some levels there are clearly articulated visions around the privacy of library users, the implementation of privacy practices at the local level remains spotty. Some of this is due to limited time or resources, but some of it is a lack of culture around privacy norms within institutions. Building that culture will mean that every decision someone makes at their job in the library will consider patron
privacy to some degree, even if individuals disagree on appropriate measures. Like all cultural shifts, it takes time and empathy to help people to see the benefits and requirements of new ways of thinking, and creating tangible exercises for working through these challenges is one way to address them.
I suggest ways of building and maintaining a culture of privacy through the act of writing and revising a privacy policy based on my experience at Loyola University Chicago. When approached as a holistic project to understand why decisions have been made a certain way in the past and how to shift—or radically transform—that decision-making, rewriting policy can be transformative for institutions. The process is certainly no panacea, but with a document in place and widely accepted, the process of periodic review and revision can maintain practices throughout time. More than the specific items to include in a policy, which are well-covered by many resources, this chapter guides you in how to think about decision-making as part of building or maintaining privacy culture through a case study of writing this specific policy.

Heller, M. (2023). Building a Culture of Privacy through collaborative policy development. In S. Hartman-Caverly and A. Chisholm (Eds.), Practicing Privacy Literacy in Academic Libraries: Theories, Methods, and Cases. ACRL. https://ecommons.luc.edu/lib_facpubs/40/

Contributor: Marisol Moreno Ortiz, Reference and Instruction Librarian, Clark College Libraries.