The Center for Information Policy Research has been awarded a National Leadership Grants for Libraries award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for the project “Library Values & Privacy in our National Digital Strategies: Field guides, Convenings, and Conversations.”

CIPR will be partnering with Data & Society, along with the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom and the New York Public Library, to host a national forum exploring what the library value of privacy means in the digital world. The forum will bring together library practitioners and administrators, along with technology, policy, and privacy experts, to establish a national roadmap for a digital privacy strategy for libraries. 

Along with the roadmap, the project will produce a series of field guides for librarians that clearly lay out important privacy and security issues. Field guides will include topics such as: privacy by design, internal library information systems, third-party library software systems, cloud-based library systems, public internet and wifi services, licensing of digital content, data security, government information requests, and social media strategies

CIPR director Dr. Michael Zimmer will be working with Bonnie Tijerina, a researcher at Data & Society, to facilitate the project. The award was one of 25 projects funded out of 90 applications.