would be willing to commit their institution “to making public the content of publisher agreements, including pricing, special arrangements, and other privileges.” Thirty-five percent of audience members indicated they would commit to public disclosure “under all circumstances,” and forty-four percent indicated they would “under most circumstances.” The ARL Board also supported a resolution from the Scholarly Communication Steering Committee to “strongly encourage ARL member libraries to refrain from signing agreements with publishers or vendors, either individually or through consortia, that included non-disclosure or confidentiality clauses.” The values of transparency and public disclosure that underlie state open records laws should guide library transactions whether their home institutions are public or private. Libraries should respect that commercial partners may need to protect certain business and technological secrets, but not agree to keep licenses or core financial arrangements confidential. Libraries must “insist on their own right to discuss aspects pertaining to their broader community.”5 Principle 8: Libraries should ensure that the confidentiality of users is protected in the vendor’s products. The confidentiality of usage data is one of the guiding principles of the library profession. In almost every state, library usage data is also protected by law. If a library digitized and made accessible to its patrons resources from its holdings, it should hold in confidence any personally identifiable information associated with the use of that material. The same principle should apply to material digitized by a commercial entity working in partnership with the library. Libraries should insist that personally identifiable information is scrubbed from commercial log files and content management systems. Alternatively, commercial systems must offer library patrons the option of reading and working anonymously. Principle 9: Libraries should refrain from charging fees or royalties for access to or non-commercial use of public domain materials held in their collections. The combination of digitization technologies and Internet distribution can radically transform how researchers make use of special collections materials. As the Budapest Open Access Initiative has noted, “removing RLI 267 24 The Collaborative Imperative: Special Collections in the Digital Age ( C O N T I N U E D ) DECEMBER 2009 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC
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