Encouraging patron adoption of privacy-protection technologies:

Threats to our patrons’ privacy have been a long-standing concern in libraries, though our responsibilities were largely bounded by the physical library space. Today, fueled by novel technologies, the landscape is vastly different, with patrons’ privacy threatened by an ever-increasing number of entities. In this complexity, libraries have continued their commitment to privacy, with public libraries now seeking to educate patrons about privacy threats, protective measures, and tools that they might employ. This review of literature seeks to identify challenges to United States public libraries in educating and advocating for patron use of privacy-protection technology tools, drawing from research in a variety of allied fields, while suggesting future research directions. Issues identified include: substantial technology-related knowledge gaps in our patrons, librarians, and library staff; the need to support a vast number of technology tools and techniques; as well as building our understanding of the perspective of the tools’ underlying creators.

Introducing web components into the LIS graduate curriculum

Purpose

This paper introduces web components, one of the most exciting and potentially transformative of the technologies that comprise HTML5. Web components provide a standardised method of creating and sharing custom HTML elements.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper is a viewpoint.

Findings

The paper proposes that the web development curriculum in library and information science (LIS) graduate programs needs to expand to cover this important topic.

Originality/value

Despite the potentially seismic impact of web components on Web development, up until this point, there has not been a discussion of this technology within the LIS literature.