Recently Asked Questions (RAQs)
Displaying 26 - 30 of 414
| Question | Submission Date |
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| 2025 “First Amendment Auditor” in The Library Roundup [We got some questions from a library in the midst of revising a policy on recording in the library...] Are staff required to give their first and last names (or any name) to an auditor or member of the public on demand? |
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| Best practices for faxing sensitive documents In this RAQ’s section 2, “Libraries, Fax Lines, and HIPAA,” you say, there is NO CIRCUMSTANCE under which a public, academic or public library should be engaging in a HIPAA-governed communication.” You also say, “If your library is not transmitting this type of information, you can stop sweating about HIPAA, even if patrons are using your fax to send it.” Just so that we are crystal clear: this means that if patrons need to use a fax machine to correspond with a doctor’s office, it’s okay as long as they are the ones who physically use the fax machine? If they require help, can staff tell them how to use the machine as long as we don’t handle the physical documents? |
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| Public Library Taxes: Does a 259 Automatically End a 414? I am seeking information about what happens to pre-existing funding sources when a library holds a successful funding vote. It had been my understanding, in the case of a 259, that the municipal funders were no longer allowed to collect the amount of money that had been used to fund the library. Is this true? The same question about apply to a 414 or a school district public library. Library trustees and directors are interested in this information and so are the voters. The reverse of this is also a question that comes up. After a successful funding vote, can a municipality decide to allocate funds from their budget to go to the library?’ Clarification on these points would be very helpful when working on future votes! |
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| Student Newspaper Archives, Fair Use, Licensing, and the DMCA We are uncertain how to proceed with further digitization of our college’s student newspapers. Currently, the newspapers published between 1948 and 2016 are digitized. They were made available online through a page hosted on the college’s website as well as the NYS Historic Newspapers database. Since the mid-2010s, articles from the newspaper have been published simultaneously online and in the print edition distributed across campus. The college’s administration received a complaint from a company called Copytrack regarding two images used in past issues of the paper. The college’s response was to scrub the images from the online archive of past issues and restrict access to the archives, effectively removing the entire digitized collection of its archives from the newspaper’s website. However, since the issues in question were from 2017 and 2018, the digitized collection still remains intact on NYS Historic Newspapers, where the library has it hosted. We’re uncertain what weight this complaint from Copytrack holds and hope to digitize the remainder of the publication soon, within the bounds of copyright restrictions. After this copyright complaint, is it advisable to leave the collection in NYS Historic Newspapers and continue adding to it, or should we plan to take it down and only digitize future copies for in-house preservation purposes? |
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| Compelling reasons to use an automated payroll system I work at a library with a diverse range of employee types, including part-time, full-time, union, and non-union staff. Unfortunately, time tracking methods vary widely, with most employees using paper timesheets. There are also inconsistencies in how comp time, overtime, flexible schedules, and double time are applied, even for those not in the union. |