Libraries Keep Extensive Records

10,000 EPA Scientists Protest Library Closures Loss of Access to Collections Will Hamper Emergency Response and Research By: Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility

" Librarians Win as U.S. Relents on Secrecy Law After fighting ferociously for months, federal prosecutors relented yesterday and agreed to allow a Connecticut library group to identify itself as the recipient of a secret F.B.I. demand for records in a counterterrorism investigation. The decision ended a dispute over whether the broad provisions for secrecy in the USA Patriot Act, the antiterror law, trumped the free speech rights of library officials. The librarians had gone to federal court to gain permission to identify themselves as the recipients of the secret subpoena, known as a national security letter, ordering them to turn over patron records and e-mail messages. The government was also under pressure to drop its fight after mistakenly disclosing in court records the very information it was fighting to keep secret. April 13, 2006

Libraries Say Yes, Officials Do Quiz Them About Users Law enforcement officials have made at least 200 formal and informal inquiries to libraries for information on reading material and other internal matters since October 2001

House Votes To Curb Patriot Act FBI's Power to Seize Library Records Would Be Halted June 16, 2005

From _The Match_ Number 98, this time from the "Around & About" column:

Analysis Catches On =============== In a blurb about the fifth biennial edition of "Alternative Publishers of Books in North America", Sanford Berman writes these lines which will seem familiar to Match readers:

"The most effectively 'banned books' in America are not the 'challenged', invariably mainstream titles widely publicized by the American Library Association. Instead, they're the works produced by the diverse, independent and unorthodox presses listed in APBNA.

No book-burning zealot has the chance to 'challenge' the presence of alternative press materials on library shelves, simply because too many such volumes aren't there in the first place. They're not selected, not bought, not catalogued, not loaned, not displayed. But it doesn't need to be that way.

The profession can stop murdering its own noble Library Bill of Rights by actively identifying and collecting the varied, enlightening and sometimes unsettling stuff issued by non-corporate publishers."

Libraries Keep Extensive Records ======================== At a time when "anti-terrorist" laws authorize the governmental delving into a person's reading habits, (see above), you may well wonder how extensive library records actually are. A librarian we asked about this responded (on condition of anonymity):

"The library administration has set up the patrons' files to make it seem that their circulation records contain only those items currently checked out, or for which a fine is owed or has been paid for in the past. Individual items being checked out have their files set up to make it seem that only the current patron and the previous patron who checked the item out are recorded, and that all records prior to that are erased."

"Records the library administration keeps regarding circulation and patrons are far more comprehensive than these administrators admit. Basically, the full information is maintained in a separate database which is kept hidden and pass-coded for restricted access."

The writer continues: "If I may state the obvious, this is yet another example of the main reason why computerization of systems once performed by hand is pushed on us so very insistently."

"The one thing that a computer system can do that a manual system can't, is keep complete records of people's lives without letting the people being recorded in on the secret."

"This is, I think, why libraries abandoned the tried-and-true method of tracking circulation with cards inserted in pockets in books: One can't write down the name of every person who checked out a certain book on a card without a lot of people noticing it, and objecting most vigorously."

"With a computer, the title of every single book a particular person (a 'suspected terrorist' at one moment, a 'dissident wanted for sedition' the next) checked out, when they did so, how long they kept it, and so on, can be right at somebody's fingertips."

"And of course, it is now a snap to plant some book in the library and keep close tabs on who becomes interested enough in it to check it out..."