Saturday, May 5, 2007
Yes, I am a librarian!
Evelyn: Look, I... I may not be an explorer, or an adventurer or a treasure-seeker, or a gunfighter, Mr. O'Connell, but I am proud of what I am.
Rick: And what is that?
Evelyn: I... am a librarian.
From The Mummy (1999) starring Rachel Weisz and Brendan Fraser
I get some of the most interesting reactions when I tell people that I am a librarian. The most common is “You don’t look like a librarian!”. Oops, sorry, I guess I left my bun and horn-rimmed glasses at home tonight. The second most common reaction is “Oh, so you must really like to read” or – my favourite – “It must be nice to get paid to read books all day”. The most interesting reaction was when I told one of my new neighbours that I had worked as a library manager. Her response was similar to that of someone spitting a mouthful of coffee when they've heard something shockingly funny, then she looked embarrassed and stammered: “I’ve never actually met a librarian before!”.
Well, I certainly didn’t become a librarian for the prestige or the glamour. I decided to become a librarian because I had always enjoyed being in libraries and immersing myself in the world of ideas. All that knowledge that could just be pulled off the shelf to read, and to take home – for free! I liked the idea of teaching people and helping them learn, of being the person who knew just what you were looking for and just where to find it. It was the late 80’s when I decided to do a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science, so there was no Internet, not a lot of people had computers in their home (although my Dad bought me and my brother a Commodore VIC-20 way back in 1981!). When I graduated, I was sure that I would be working at the information desk in a public library in a large urban centre somewhere, getting to know the regular customers and their interests, hearing about their families, and generally becoming part of the local community.
It didn’t exactly work out that way, as cutbacks in the public sector in the early 90’s meant there were very few jobs in public libraries. So my career, like many librarians I know, has been decidedly unconventional. Although, unconventional is probably the way most librarians would describe their jobs anyway!
So, to help conquer the stereotype, here is my list of Things You Wouldn’t Think a Librarian Would Do (but I’ve actually done all of these in my library career!):
1. Interview a panel of architects for a new building design
2. Work with a team to develop a handicapped accessible high school library
3. Teach Boolean logic and other search skills to teachers
4. Work with a lawyer to develop a major systems contract
5. Implement a media management system
6. Work as a systems analyst
7. Write software training documentation
8. Manage millions of dollars in budget
9. Implement an electronic document management system
10. Write Requests for Proposal for large-scale projects
11. Test barcode readers for elementary schools, with the assistance of a group of third graders
12. Know the difference between CODABAR and CODE39 barcodes (sad, but true)
13. Investigate RFID technology
14. Oversee the implementation of Self Service Check-out technology
Seventeen years after graduating with an MLIS, I’ve had a very different career than I expected I would, in fact, it seems I’ve had about 3 careers so far. But it’s all been interesting and the qualities that attracted me to librarianship in the first place – curiosity, finding and organizing information, sharing ideas, helping people – have all been essential skills in my career.
So, like Evie Carnahan, I am proud of what I am. Yes, Mr. O'Connell, I ... am a librarian.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Government Bans Facebook … but MySpace is still okay
Employees with the Ontario government who tried to log in to their Facebook accounts this morning were met with an “access denied” message. Even most members of parliament and cabinet ministers have been blocked from Facebook, which joins a list along with online gambling and porn sites. The ban took everyone by surprise, including Public Infrastructure Minister David Caplan, one of the few cabinet ministers with a Facebook page.The rationale for the ban was rather vague:
When even the Canadian Prime Minister has a page on Facebook, it obviously is considered an important way for politicians to get their message out. Any employer has the right to restrict the sites that employees access from employer networks and governments are accountable to taxpayers for ensuring that employees are productive on the job. Most public sector employers have policies in place which outline appropriate use of the Internet, and in many cases, employees are required to sign a document that goes into their permanent record."The staff determined it's not as directly related to the workplace as we'd like it to be so we're restricting access to it," Government Services Minister Gerry Phillips told the Toronto Star.
"Our IT (information technology) people are pretty broadly familiar with the marketplace and they said, `Here's a website that's going to be increasingly more popular for the OPS (Ontario public service). Is this an appropriate website to be spending time on?'" he said.
"It's the ministry making these decisions on trying to ... restrict access to ones that are inappropriate and then to anticipate where one may grow in popularity and we may end up with a lot of OPS time being taken (up) on it."
The vague rationale for this ban and the fact that other social networking sites, including MySpace, are still accessible to government employees and ministers does raise questions. One has to wonder if the Ontario government was really concerned about the amount of time that employees and elected officials were spending on Facebook or if they were actually more concerned about what information might be shared on a popular public forum.
Either way, it seems that it will become increasingly difficult for employers to stay on top of the many ways that employees can become distracted by online activities from the work they’re paid to do. In the meantime, I suspect many employees will move along to MySpace or other social networking sites … until the Ontario government denies access to those as well.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Was your privacy breached today?
Consider these scenarios:- Your new husband’s ex-wife, who works for a medical office, looks up your medical records.
- The mail delivery cart in a government office is left unattended in a public area while the mail clerk takes a coffee break.
- You drop by your boss’s office to update her on your project and notice a disciplinary report on her desk, with the name of a fellow manager showing prominently on the front page
- You open your annual pension plan update and discover someone else’s report is in the envelope instead of your own
- A major retailer discovers that their network has been hacked, with potentially hundreds of thousands of customer credit card numbers accessed
- Your friend in the benefits department tells you at lunch that a co-worker and mutual friend has been submitting claims for visits to a psychiatrist for the past several months.
Which of these scenarios would you consider to be a privacy breach? If you answered all of them, you would be right. According to Canadian privacy legislation, data that is collected or disclosed without authorization is considered a privacy breach. It doesn’t matter that the breach was overt, inadvertent or accidental; the consequences and implications are equally severe.
Security is a means to achieve privacy. Security is established through rigid policies and procedures, a code of ethics and regular training for staff. Security is also established on the information technology side by restricting data access to only those who need it. For example, the government health minister, responsible for overseeing policy direction for his jurisdiction does not require access to citizen health records to do his job, while a clerk responsible for verifying medical claims does require access to those records. While one might expect the health minister to understand the importance of ensuring the privacy of medical records, it is the staff member who actually accesses the records who is in most need of training. And often, these front-line staff are the least-trained in the organization, yet they have the greatest potential to cause a security breach, the majority of which will be accidental or inadvertent.
Organizations need to ensure that the staff who assume the greatest risk through their exposure to confidential information receive annual training about their obligations with respect to privacy legislation and the potential consequences of a privacy breach. Organizations also need a clear set of policies and procedures for dealing with privacy breaches.
Organizations need to ensure that their I.T. departments have adequate budgets to ensure regular upgrades to hardware and software, as well as regular training for their staff.
Governments also need to strengthen privacy legislation to ensure that organizations are accountable to the public in the event of a privacy breach. In the case of the recent TJ Maxx hacking, for example, most U.S. states and Canadian provinces had no legal requirement for the retailer to inform customers that their credit card data had been compromised. Monday's session at the Prairie health information privacy conference highlights the ongoing challenge that privacy breaches, inadvertent or otherwise, present to the public and private sector.
So think back on where you were today – where you work, where you shop, where you ate lunch, where you live – do you know if your privacy was breached today?
Monday, April 16, 2007
The future of privacy: lots of questions, no real answers
We live in a world where being connected and available 24/7 is taken for granted. Was I really born into a world where you drove around looking for a payphone and then hunted for a dime to make a call? Did I once really own one of those huge brick car phones? I remember at 15, my best friend taking me to her bank machine - the first and one and only for several years in my little hometown - and showing me how she could get money from the bank anytime she wanted. Amazing! Fast forward a few decades and if you're a teenager or college student and you're not on Facebook, well, you don't exist. Reality TV promises everyone 15 minutes of fame. Or you can join the masses and start a blog. Or set up shop in Second Life. It's not that we are ghosts in the machine; we are not real unless we are in the machine. It's all happened so fast.
