Recently Asked Questions (RAQs)

[We got a question from a library system...]

It recently came to our attention that a civil service department overseeing hiring for a public library was not allowing a job candidate’s experience at an Empire State Library Network (ESLN) council to count as valid library experience at a “library of recognized standing.”

The department stated that they do not consider working at an ESLN council—or any other library system—to be equivalent to experience in an actual library setting, and therefore would not count it toward the candidate’s qualifications.

This raises concerns. Many of us working in library systems view our roles as part of the broader library sector. Systems typically require significant library experience to qualify for these positions, and we often serve as a resource for our member libraries because of that expertise. It’s generally understood that this experience is transferable across library types.

How should job candidates respond when faced with situations like this? Many applicants may need to include their years of system-level work in order to meeting job requirements. Do you have some guidance or strategies for navigating this issue? Thank you!

We are a Special Legislative District library holding our annual Budget Referendum and Trustee Election soon. It has come to my attention that we may be obligated to mail absentee ballots to certain people on a county supplied list. We have never done this before and with our small budget and staff time, this would presents a significant hardship for us to do this properly. Up until this point, we have made it apparent in all of our communications regarding the vote and in our public notices that absentee ballots are available at the library or by requesting one via phone or e-mail. Is this enough or do we really need to mail hundreds of ballots to people?

We currently offer a service that collects older static PDFs of library/research content and provide faculty with a URL (or permalink) to that resource in our library’s digital collections. This service provides the following enhancements:

• Increases accessibility as links will always test as accessible in Brightspace (DLE/LMS)
• Enhance student discovery of library resources.
• Provide more accurate usage metrics that influence library subscription decisions.

Occasionally, we come across an old scanned PDF of a book chapter or scholarly article that we do not subscribe to.

Our question is: If we publicly offer to remediate (as best we can) published content that we do not subscribe to or own so that faculty can place an accessible version of them in their course shells, are we violating copyright? Keep in mind these materials would only be shared with students of specific courses and would be available only through the learning management system that requires a login.

Our school district public library has offered early mail ballots for our 2024 and 2025 budget vote and trustee election. The school district is now telling us that the library is not obligated to offer early mail ballots and that only the school district is obligated to participate in early voting.

So, we have two questions:

1. Is this information correct? And, if so:
2. Since the library has used this in previous votes, do we need to continue using this additional form of voting by mail, or can we revert back to only using absentee ballots?

Outside of best practices for staff handling of sensitive documents, are public libraries otherwise bound by HIPAA, FERPA and SOX when sending faxes for patrons, in terms of the privacy protections provided (or not) by the type of fax technology?

Our library currently uses a traditional standalone fax machine (staff mediated) to send and receive public faxes across a dedicated copper phone line, so there’s a direct connection between receiver and sender, maintaining privacy during transmission. Faxing remains a popular service here largely for that reason -- patrons are often told by the fax destination that documents must be sent via fax and not scanned to email.

We’ve been told that copper phone lines will soon be eliminated, so we’re investigating fax-to-email services, which are cheaper than our current method and can use our public copier as the faxing device. However, the Forbes article linked below says faxing by email does not offer privacy protections: “Virtual fax introduces an intermediary into the fax process; there’s no direct connection between the sending and receiving parties. This can be problematic if your business has certain regulatory compliance requirements to support (for example, HIPAA, FERPA and SOX).” The article cites an encrypted kind of fax by IP, “T.38 Fax Lines,” which we suspect would not be cost effective for us.

Are libraries bound by HIPAA et al in the type of faxing technology they can use?