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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

As a teenager, around 1980, I had a part time job at the public library in my town. Our librarian was a privacy nut -- a fact that I appreciate more and more. She made a point of telling everybody at the library that the circulation records were sacrosanct. She even scolded me once for commenting on a book that a patron was checking out: It was none of my business.

She had concocted a byzantine checkout system that would have made it almost impossible to search the library's circulation records. It was part of my job to send out overdue notices. Once the records had been used for that purpose, they were destroyed. The library kept no long term circulation records.

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Thanks for sharing your story. You might have guessed -- your local librarian was not unique in her feelings about privacy. I worked for my county library all through high school and college. When I started they had an ancient mainframe circulation system, and was there when they migrated to a newer java based system. With both systems, it was a paramount requirement that records of a patron (library term for customer) checking out a book be destroyed irretrievably after the book was returned. Even in the case of overdue item resulting in a fine, after the fine was paid, no record of the circulation or even what the fine was paid for was kept. Slips of paper printed with patrons' names and phone numbers when they put items on hold were dutifully shredded every day. At one point during school, I considered the library as a profession, and as part of my research I subscribed to a "technology in libraries" listserv, and followed it for about a year. This was soon after 9/11 and the advent of the Patriot Act, when the most pernicious implications were that the feds could look at library circulation records. (Little did we know!) Many libraries were proud that their technology specifically prevented this. There was also a constant and ongoing philosophical conversation about how to make more information freely available, and make access to it (including Internet access) anonymous, and further to resist efforts by law enforcement to use libraries to gather information on their patrons or regulate access. I cannot think of an institution that defends the freedoms of thought and expression more passionately than the public library.

Our checkout system was paper based -- no names ever went into a computer. I thought that computerizing the system would be a great idea, but more because I was interested in computers than for any other reason. The librarian was opposed to it, though she was clueless about computers, but challenged me to think of how I could be absolutely sure that there would be no permanent record.

The library didn't switch to a computerized circulation system until after she retired.

The San Francisco Public Library also keeps no long-term circulation records. I really admire and appreciate this.

They think it will make people feel more freedom to check out the books that interest them, without fear of what other people will think. That seems almost certainly right. I wonder if anybody has studied the effect of reader privacy on people's reading habits. (The experiment might be a little tricky to set up because the baseline level of interest in particular books, and baseline level of stigma associated with them, could vary quite a bit from community to community.)

On the other hand, centralized circulation data is an incredibly valuable tool for determining the shape and direction for the collection. This is why some university libraries explicitly do not want you reshelving books, even correctly - they want the record that someone looked at it. The bottom x% of books by frequency of circulation can be culled to make way for new purchases.

Of course, it is not necessary that the record of usage be in any way related to the patron's identity, but a permanent record of the fact that a patron pulled the book is essential.

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