Summary
As digital collections continue to grow, the underlying technologies to serve up content also continue to expand and develop. As such, new challenges are presented whichcontinue to test ethical ideologies in everyday environs of the practitioner. There are currently no solid guidelines or overarching codes of ethics to address such issues. The digitization of modern archival collections, in particular, presents interesting conundrums when factors of privacy are weighed and reviewed in both small and mass digitization initiatives. Ethical decision making needs to be present at the onset of project planning in digital projects of all sizes, and we also need to identify the role and responsibility of the practitioner to make more virtuous decisions on behalf of those with no voice or awareness of potential privacy breaches.
In this book, notions of what constitutes private information are discussed, as is the potential presence of such information in both analog and digital collections. This book lays groundwork to introduce the topic of privacy within digital collections by providing some examples from documented real-world scenarios and making recommendations for future research.
A discussion of the notion privacy as concept will be included, as well as some historical perspective (with perhaps one the most cited work on this topic, for example, Warren and Brandeis' ""Right to Privacy,"" 1890). Concepts from the The Right to Be Forgotten case in 2014 (Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, Mario Costeja González) are discussed as to how some lessons may be drawn from the response in Europe and also how European data privacy laws have been applied. The European ideologies are contrasted with the Right to Free Speech in the First Amendment in the U.S., highlighting the complexities in setting guidelines and practices revolving around privacy issues when applied to real life scenarios. Two ethical theories are explored: Consequentialism and Deontological. Finally, ethical decision making models will also be applied to our framework of digital collections. Three case studies are presented to illustrate how privacy can be defined within digital collections in some real-world examples.
Virginia Dressler is the Digital Projects Librarian at Kent State University. She holds a Master of Art Gallery and Museum Studies degree from the University of Leeds (2003), a Master in Library and Information Science degree from Kent State University (2007), and an advanced certificate in digital librarianship from Kent State University (2014). Virginia has worked in both museum and library settings managing digital initiatives, specializing in digital preservation and digital content management. Her research interests include linked data, The Right to be Forgotten, and open source repositories.
Gary Marchionini is the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Information Science in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His Ph.D. is from Wayne State University in mathematics education with an emphasis on educational computing. His research interests are in information seeking in electronic environments, digital libraries, human-computer interaction, digital government and information technology policy. He has had grants or contracts from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Council on Library Resources, the National Library of Medicine, the Library of Congress, the Kellogg Foundation, and NASA, among others. He was the Conference Chair for the 1996 ACM Digital Library Conference and program chair for the 2002 ACM-IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. He is editor-in-chief for ACM Transactions on Information Systems and serves on the editorial boards of a dozen scholarly journals. He has published more than 150 articles, chapters, and conference papers in the information science, computer science, and education literatures. He founded the Interaction Design Laboratory at UNC-CH.
