Librarians as Advocates for Social Media Privacy

Librarians must continue their traditional roles as privacy rights activists and intellectual freedom upholders into the digital age, and across electronic information sources, including social media fora. Social media is quickly becoming a major source of information and center for information seeking, and librarians have an opportunity to promote and help shape social media policies that protect users’ privacy and assure that users can seek information without inhibition. One way librarians can be involved in the promotion of online privacy is by joining the social media user rights movement and advocating terms of use agreements that protect information seekers that follow the "Privacy by Design" model created by Ann Cavoukian, Ph.D.

Social Media, Privacy, and the Academic Classroom

We live in a world full of social media and portable technology that allows for the effortless access to, and sharing of, information. While this constant connection can be viewed as a benefit by some, there have been recent, sometimes embarrassing, instances throughout the world that show just how quickly any expectation of privacy can be destroyed. From pictures of poorly dressed shoppers at a grocery store to customers recording interactions with their servers at restaurants, the internet is full of media (all with the potential to go viral) created and posted without consent of all parties captured. This risk to privacy is not just limited to retail and restaurants, as being in any situation amongst people puts you at risk, including being in an academic classroom. Anyone providing in-class instruction, be they professor or librarian, can be at risk for this type of violation of privacy. In addition, the students in the class are also at risk for being unwittingly captured by their classmates. To combat this, colleges and universities are providing recommendations to faculty regarding this issue, such as including suggested syllabus statements about classroom recording by students. In some instances, colleges and universities have instituted formal policies with strict penalties for violators. An overview of current privacy law as it relates to an academic setting is discussed as well as recent, newsworthy instances of student recording in the classroom and the resulting controversies. Additionally, there is a discussion highlighting various recommendations and formal policies that have been issued and adopted by colleges and universities around the country. Finally, advice is offered about what librarians can do to educate students, faculty, and staff about the privacy rights of others and the potential harm that could come from posting to social media and the open web images and video of others without their consent.

A Resource Centric Approach For Advancing Collaboration Through Hydrologic Data And Model Sharing

HydroShare is an online, collaborative system being developed for open sharing of hydrologic data and models. The goal of HydroShare is to enable scientists to easily discover and access hydrologic data and models, retrieve them to their desktop or perform analyses in a distributed computing environment that may include grid, cloud or high performance computing model instances as necessary. Scientists may also publish outcomes (data, results or models) into HydroShare, using the system as a collaboration platform for sharing data, models and analyses. HydroShare is expanding the data sharing capability of the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System by broadening the classes of data accommodated, creating new capability to share models and model components, and taking advantage of emerging social media functionality to enhance information about and collaboration around hydrologic data and models. One of the fundamental concepts in HydroShare is that of a Resource. All content is represented using a Resource Data Model that separates system and science metadata and has elements common to all resources as well as elements specific to the types of resources HydroShare will support. These will include different data types used in the hydrology community and models and workflows that require metadata on execution functionality. The HydroShare web interface and social media functions are being developed using the Drupal content management system. A geospatial visualization and analysis component enables searching, visualizing, and analyzing geographic datasets. The integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) is being used to manage federated data content and perform rule-based background actions on data and model resources, including parsing to generate metadata catalog information and the execution of models and workflows. This presentation will introduce the HydroShare functionality developed to date, describe key elements of the Resource Data Model and outline the roadmap for future development.