[Michlib-l] Privacy/confidentiality policies?

[Rebekah Dobski]

Hello all :)

Wondering if anyone has a specific policy on patron privacy mostly regarding their personal information? It can include other aspects of privacy as well.

The reason I am asking is due to an incident that happened yesterday. We had a deputy from the sheriff's office find a collection of different cards belonging to someone but with no way to contact them. There was one of our library cards which lead the police to bring the items to us to figure out how to get in contact with the people the cards belonged to. The police asked us to scan it and then give the people a call. I am not sure about other libraries but this tends to be pretty run of the mill here where a library card is found by someone and they drop it off to us to help get it back to the right person. My employee called the number linked to the card and explained we were calling because a collection of cards was picked up by the police and telling them they had been found. My employee asked multiple times for the person to calm down and to stop swearing, as did the police. It seems as though the person didn't understand why the library was calling him and not the police. It was a very tense situation that was hard for my employee and very frustrating for the officer, who ended up hanging up on this person as it was so bad.

Our library doesn't have anything in a policy format at this time and while the ALA does offer information regarding this I believe we need to have something in our files that directly addresses this. The person believes the library didn't need to be involved in calling them, and that we as a third party had no right to do so and the officer should have made this call, despite him not having access to the information. As far as I am aware (I could be wrong), my staff and the sheriff both did what they should have done in this situation. We can't share patrons information with anyone regardless and this wasn't a situation of an emergency, but of course had we gotten a request via law enforcement for information THAT is a different story. Nevertheless, I would like to have a policy and a way to show this person we have taken steps to have a formal policy and a way ahead so similar situations don't arise.

If you've read this far... thank you! What's prepping for a board meeting if you don't have a last minute wrench in the plans!! :)

Best,



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