By Gili Warsett, Hannah Mermelstein, and Maria Falgoust
At our next HVLA meeting (January 18), we plan to explore issues of privacy and digital citizenship as they relate to school librarianship. In this post, a few of us scrape the surface of this conversation as we talk about our own policies and thoughts. Please join the conversation in the comments!
Gili Warsett: As a Preschool and Lower School Librarian, my stance on patron privacy has evolved, and is evolving as the world changes. Although most of my students are happy to share their circulation history with each other, I now begin each school year by laying ground rules about privacy for our oldest lower school students, the third and fourth grade, when they are learning and/or reviewing how to do self-checkout. Our students use iPads to check their patron status and to check out books. I am very firm that they are not to look under anybody else’s library account when they are checking out books. They may not search their siblings’ or friends’ accounts. If I find that students have intentionally looked at somebody else’s account information, their iPad privileges are suspended.