Week 5 readings

I apologize for the lack of weeks three and four reading blogs absence. They will be up shortly

Byrne, David S.(2010) 'Access to Online Local Government Public Records: The Privacy Paradox', Legal
Reference Services Quarterly, 29: 1, 1 — 21

I loved the readability of this article, and how close it is to some of the work I have done, and am doing now. The history of science department had a flood in their storage room this summer, and because of it they lost three boxes of records. This led the newly appointed chair to realize that nobody had touched their records (or thrown anything away) going back to the inception of the program in 1947. She rightly thought that this would upset those in authority, if they learned of it, and so I was hired to figure out what they ought to have been doing all along, and then quietly do it. So started a month of learning what documents count as public records and what is supposed to be done with them, and then going through what they have in order to dispose of it properly.

The stuff I found ranged from the eye gougingly mundane to the hilariously fascinating (a 1970s era professor defending his unorthodox hippie grading rubric to an unamused 1950s era department chair). I also have gone through the student records of about 100 people, found 10 social security numbers, and read some extremely personal correspondence. Most of these documents are going to Archives, but eventually they will be digitized, and freely available to any who are curious.

Avoiding giving away very important personal data is a scary reality in this case, but I was heartened by the case studies which were grave, but not as bleak as they might be.

My parents are currently dealing with a fraud case in which someone has co-opted their phone number and address. To what purpose is not yet clear, but the implications might be chilling.

All of the articles this week deal with the right to privacy, and how murky the legal surroundings are on every front for this issue. I was slightly aghast at some of the implications with the tissue issues brought up by the Charo article. While my personal opinions on the use of fetal tissue to create stem cell lines is uninformedly pro, the article also gave me pause with how much say is given up when such a donation is given.. One of my favorite science fiction series deals with a tissue sample is stolen from the protagonist and a clone grown from it becomes a major character- not the soulless abomination in the eyes of god that some pundits of the issue would have you believe be the outcome, but a separate person, and by law, the protagonists baby brother. (The Vorkosigan Saga)

We relinquish our right to to the privacy of our waste, be it bodily or otherwise, when we abandon it- leaving it to be picked up by the garbage men, or in the toilet, but if you lost a diamond ring down the drain, and it was recovered at the sewage plant, would they allow you to reclaim it? I think (tho the chances would be slim) that they would. Is the biological wealth of our tissue different? This most bugged me with the University of Washington's miserly reluctance to have the prostate tissue samples leave their university with the professor who collected them.

The right to privacy is an important one for librarians to pay especial attention to, especially for the reason you (Alan) mentioned in class, that sooner or later we are all health librarians, we are all privy to the worries, problems and needs of our patrons.