Library News, Reviews, and Views
I’m a writer, and a geek. So if CourseSmart had wanted to track students’ use of its etextbooks to improve the texts themselves, I could totally sympathize. But it seems to me that CourseSmart wants to use those analytics to fix, not the book, but the reader, and that has the potential to disturb privacy advocates and put students off etextbooks altogether.
CourseSmart, the world’s largest provider of digital course materials, has announced a pilot test of CourseSmart Analytics, a program that will evaluate how students use specific textbooks, measuring page views, total time spent reading, as well as notes and highlights made. In aggregate, the data will allow professors, course designers, and academic administrators to assess the effectiveness of digital titles. Faculty will also have access to the etextbook reading habits of specific students enrolled in their courses.
CourseSmart, the world’s largest provider of digital course materials, has announced a pilot test of CourseSmart Analytics, a program that will evaluate how students use specific textbooks, measuring page views, total time spent reading, as well as notes and highlights made. In aggregate, the data will allow professors, course designers, and academic administrators to assess the effectiveness of digital titles. Faculty will also have access to the etextbook reading habits of specific students enrolled in their courses.
More than 95 percent of librarians who responded to a recent survey said that “government agencies and businesses shouldn’t share personal information with third parties without authorization and should only be used for a specific purpose,” according to the preliminary findings of a study released by the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom
California Governor Jerry Brown has signed the Reader Privacy Act, updating the state’s reader privacy law to cover ebooks and online book services. The law will take effect January 1. The law will establish privacy protections for book purchases similar to long-established privacy laws for library records, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which sponsored [...]
The lending of library ebooks through the Amazon Kindle will likely expose the growing hollowness of some core principles of librarianship. Here are two extracts from September 22 draft documents that the ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy E-book Task Force has begun circulating about ebooks: ALA policies apply fully to e-books, including those that [...]
California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Tuesday a measure that will modernize the state’s library privacy laws. The bill, SB445 sponsored by Senator Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), updates circulation of records laws in order to keep confidential electronic as well as written patron use information and borrowing records. The information cannot be disclosed by [...]
INFOdocket by Gary Price
OverDrive & Big (Private) Data | Editorial
Who owns library and patron user data? Libraries think they do but will that matter in an increasingly competitive landscape where data is very valuable?