Privacy or Marketing Data, originally uploaded by JenWaller.
WOW I am enjoying JenWaller’s set of photos from her tour of DOK. So good to see my Shanachie friends in their library showing things off. Jenn writes:
Erik and Jaap explain and demonstrate how the DOK library cards (and their system) operate. Again, similar to CDR, privacy is a little different here. DOK gathers lots of information about their users, and they use that data to make all kinds of decisions about services, programming, marketing, etc. They said they could tell how much cream a user puts in his/her coffee 🙂
I later asked about the Dutch laws as they regard police seizure of this kind of information. The laws are similar to U.S. laws — the police need to present a warrant before private data is handed over. DOK thinks about privacy a lot and tries to balance issues of user privacy with issues of how to best serve their users. In this vein, they periodically do “data dumps” of some of the user information. But some of the staff receive daily reports on what their users are doing.
This is a perfect “field trip” for use in classes. Thanks Jen!