Recently Asked Questions (RAQs)

Recently a law firm from Albany sent us a memo claiming to represent the plaintiff in a civil suit and informing us of their intent to have a subpoena issued for access to our security footage on a particular day. The memo asked us to preserve the footage in question in expectation of the subpoena. They did not specify an area of the library or a time for the footage.

I would like to know what limitations and obligations we have in this civil matter with regard to patron privacy.

Recently a question has come up at our academic library concerning patron privacy and the notification to a patron (usually a student) concerning excessive downloading of content from databases in our collection. Our current practice has been to receive notification from the vendor about perceived illegal downloading. We then ask a member of our library IT team to investigate the situation, based on the information from the vendor. The contact information acquired by that IT staff member is then provided to the e-resource librarian. That librarian then contacts the individual via email, explaining the situation and indicating that such behavior must cease. Once that is done, the librarian notifies the vendor that the situation has been addressed, and there is no need to withhold access to the product from the campus. No personal identification of the user or student is provided to the vendor, nor distributed to anyone else. The question now: Is this process appropriate in resolving the misuse of a database, or does it violate the user’s/student’s privacy rights?