Anonymity is not mutually exclusive to invasion of privacy. If you walk up to me and take my picture without asking and you don’t know my name, it doesn’t make it alright.

If I’m a patron and I have a question, and I can tell it’s going to be posted on a website for everyone else to see, I might not even ask. You would rob me of access to reference services.

It’s entirely possible that you’d attract more patrons than you’d turn away, and this is exciting. We love the zeitgeist. But no amount of cool factor is worth completely stripping reference service of its confidentiality.

Go ahead, show a feed on a password-protected site for reference staff. And publicly, it’s fine to post the text of some reference questions, but not all of them, and not unconditionally and without any other choice for patrons.

The burden is on us to get permission before publishing reference questions. Opting in could also give warning to patrons to exclude personal information so you won’t have to worry about scrubbing it out so much.

You’ll still want to watch out for naughty words and spammers – I love naughty words, but mindless, CIPA-compliant filtering software loaded on school and library computers does not.

It is worth making the effort to do this sort of thing right. And yeah, I have ways to do it

Anonymity is not mutually exclusive to invasion of privacy. If you walk up to me and take my picture without asking and you don’t know my name, it doesn’t make it alright.

If I’m a patron and I have a question, and I can tell it’s going to be posted on a website for everyone else to see, I might not even ask. You would rob me of access to reference services.

It’s entirely possible that you’d attract more patrons than you’d turn away, and this is exciting. We love the zeitgeist. But no amount of cool factor is worth completely stripping reference service of its confidentiality.

Go ahead, show a feed on a password-protected site for reference staff. And publicly, it’s fine to post the text of some reference questions, but not all of them, and not unconditionally and without any other choice for patrons.

The burden is on us to get permission before publishing reference questions. Opting in could also give warning to patrons to exclude personal information so you won’t have to worry about scrubbing it out so much.

You’ll still want to watch out for naughty words and spammers – I love naughty words, but mindless, CIPA-compliant filtering software loaded on school and library computers does not.

It is worth making the effort to do this sort of thing right. And yeah, I have ways to do it

I’d love to have the questions as they happen to be added (identifying info scrubbed of course) to a website or something, but we haven’t figured out a way to do that yet. We use QuestionPoint for our VRS- if anyone has any ideas on how to do this, please let me know!

I’d love to have the questions as they happen to be added (identifying info scrubbed of course) to a website or something, but we haven’t figured out a way to do that yet. We use QuestionPoint for our VRS- if anyone has any ideas on how to do this, please let me know!