Hi everyone! The IMLS-funded National Forum on Web Privacy and Web Analytics project team is excited to share an update. Last fall we hosted an event at Montana State University that brought together 40 librarians, technologists, and privacy researchers with the goal of producing a practical roadmap for enhancing our analytics practice in support of privacy. (For an overview and background, please visit our project site: http://www.lib.montana.edu/privacy-forum). 

Today, we’re sharing the in-draft documents that represent the results of this community Forum. 

We hope that you will take a closer look and provide critical feedback and new ideas for improvement. Your feedback is requested by April 1 so that we can incorporate it into our final documents.

Here’s what we’ve got for you:


Action Handbook: A practice-oriented action handbook that provides background, resources, and best practices to guide libraries in responsibly implementing web analytics. Link to draft Action Handbook: http://tiny.cc/actionhandbook 


Pathways to Action: A set of 8 initiatives for achieving better analytics practices that supports user privacy. Each of the 8 ideas below were co-created by participants at the Forum event, and have since been iterated and improved through wider community feedback. Each Pathway will be available to the community as a project idea to remix, reuse, and apply. Take a look at the Pathways, and let us know how they can be further improved or refined. 

1) Analytics Dashboard: A simple, lightweight analytics framework and dashboard to show only necessary data points. More information: http://tiny.cc/privacyanalyticsdashboard 

2) Privacy Certification and Badging: A Privacy Certification System to establish stratified data privacy standards for libraries and their information vendors. More information: http://tiny.cc/privacycert 

3) Toolkit for Values-based Assessment: Tools and best practices for implementing ethical and user-conscious assessment. More information: http://tiny.cc/assessmenttoolkit 

4) Privacy Research Institute: A research institute to create evidence-based privacy advocacy. More information: http://tiny.cc/researchinstitute 

5) Leadership Training: A privacy-focused training module that can be integrated with established leadership institute. More information: http://tiny.cc/privacyleadershiptraining 

6) Privacy Policy Workshop Series: Professional development workshops for writing and implementing library privacy policies. More information: http://tiny.cc/policyworkshops 

7) Tribal Communities and Organizations: Education and outreach to tribal colleges and universities, tribal youth organization, and Indigenous languages organizations. More information: http://tiny.cc/tribalcommunities 

8) Model License Language for Vendor Contracts: Developing model license language that would support libraries in advocating for user privacy when contracting for services and content. More information: http://tiny.cc/modellicense 


Your feedback will directly inform the development and finalization of these ideas and documents. We appreciate the time and energy it takes to read and review, and we’re grateful for any comments you make to the documents.

We’ll release another update in May when the documents are finalized. 

Please visit our project site [http://www.lib.montana.edu/privacy-forum], or contact Project Director Scott Young [http://www.lib.montana.edu/people/99] for more information on the project and the documents that we’ve shared above.

Thank you!!