RE: Message from Kevin Guthrie, JSTOR's President

[Phil Davis <pmd8@cornell.edu>]

Thank you Chuck for returning to the responsibility of the library to
protect the confidentiality of our patron's rights.  Whether our not our
patron cares about his or her rights, the library cannot be put in the
position of sacrificing them in name of protecting publishers against
random acts of abuse.  When they do happen, the publisher is the first to
deal with the issue, and the library has always assisted in closing
loopholes.  While the rest of our country has become infatuated with the
rhetoric of security, let us not turn our libraries into police states.

AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION CODE OF ETHICS
http://www.ala.org/alaorg/oif/codeofethics.pdf

III.  We protect each library user's right to privacy and confidentiality
with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted,
borrowed, acquired or transmitted.

VI.  We do not advance private interests at the expense of library users,
colleagues, or our employing institutions.

--Phil Davis, pmd8@cornell.edu

At 11:07 PM 12/10/2002 -0500, Hamaker, Chuck wrote:
>  I agree with what David has said below. The responsibility for walk-in
>users is a continuing obligation that we carefully include in contracts.
>It might be onerous for JSTOR's system to register proxy servers, but that
>is not an impossible task I would think. If the server is registered that
>should limit substantially the access from off campus to mostly legitimate
>users, and if there is abuse then it should be easier to track who it is
>coming from if its off campus. At the same time, the abilty to provide ip
>filtering for on campus use is just too important to discontinue it. The
>ip filtering as a common filter, is also a significant reason that linked
>resources work as well as they do. And in fact, requiring each user to
>register creates other significant problems I believe, specifically if you
>have the information on who uses what, you can under the US Patriots act
>get in a situation where the individuals use of materials can always be
>tracked.
>
>We solve the problem with book circulation in some systems by breaking the
>identifying link between the exact user when the book is returned. How do
>we protect confidentiality in a system every user MUST log on.-I hope I'm
>not misunderstating this-I may not understand all the nuances.
>
>Chuck