I think what skookumchuck is referring to is the general notion that "privacy and confidentiality has long been an integral part of the intellectual freedom mission of libraries," see http://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/guidelines/library-manag...

Avoiding patrons from being tracked/potentially in the future prosecuted for their reading is professional ethics for librarians, pretty much regardless of political alignment.

I'm curious if this is still a thing. Libraries in my county have moved to a completely online system for checking out books, renewing, etc. The system regularly recommends books to me 'based on previous borrows', which indicates they are tracking/storing information about what I have borrowed in the past. The next question is, who has access to this information? My guess in the library system here does not have a strong infosec department, nor a strong legal department to resist subpoenas/police shenanigans.

Many libraries will purge checkout records once a patron returns books, but the increasing reliance on centralized cloud-based ILS vendors is making this harder to do reliably.

I'd appreciate it if you could name the online system your county uses. (Or if you can provide a link.)

Sure, here's the website: https://www.wccls.org/

I'm not sure what backend they use for data storage, etc.

That's interesting and new to me, as I'm not American. Does the American government track or prosecute people for their reading habits in libraries? Is it to be expected then that librarians are aligned to the political left?

As with all professions you'll find individual librarians that have political positions all over the board.

The biggest professional organization for them in the USA (the ALA) is not officially politically aligned, but some of their core positions, notably privacy, intellectual freedom and anti-censorship have of late have come to be seen as politically left and in the States especially more aligned with the Democratic party.

Demographically librarians in the United States do lean liberal but I don't know that they do at any higher rates than other educated people.

Finally, this is not just an American thing. The IFLA has very similar positions on privacy, intellectual freedom and censorship and monitors those positions around their world.

It isn't a left/right thing.

There was a case a while back where a woman poisoned her husband. The police found her thumbprint on a book on poisons in the library. I don't think they used library records, they just checked the book itself.

I also recall that there was considerable pushback from the librarians when the government demanded they hand over all borrower records.

Next time I go to the library I'll ask what the current state of this is. I hope their practice is to purge records when you return a book.

Since 2001 (at least) the law enforcement is supposed to have access to library records. The legal basis keeps changing, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act

It could start at some point if detailed records exist. Libraries operate long-term, political climate changes. And of course other actors could be interested in records too. I don't think you can claim someone on the political right would by default not want to protect readers.

You wouldn't, in general, be able to ban books in the US, but if it was possible to profile people based on their library records, say somebody read Das Capital, The Anarchist Cookbook and a few similar books like that and you are the police searching for an anarchist bomber?

TomJen, where in the States do you live?

Librarians have a similar professional reverence for their patrons' privacy as doctors do for their patients and attorneys for their clients.

The legal status of attorney-client privilege and medical privacy are both thoroughly enshrined, but there's no corresponding protection for borrowing records. Librarians are often in the news for protecting them.