On December 14th, Danielle Cooper will present on “Licensing Privacy: Contractual Language and the Challenge of Monitoring Compliance” at the Fall 2021 CNI Membership Meeting. For more information on this event, please visit this website.

Abstract

The Licensing Privacy initiative, made possible in part by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to improve how academic libraries leverage licensing terms to advocate for reader privacy. In fall 2021, the Licensing Privacy initiative released: (1) “View from Library Leadership” presented findings from research on how patron privacy concerns are informing academic library leaders’ strategies in negotiating with vendors, and (2) “The Vendor Contract and Policy Rubric” that can be used to evaluate how well a given vendor platform follows library privacy guidelines, standards, and best practices and guidance for how to use the rubric in advocating for privacy during vendor selection and contract negotiation. Emergent from these projects is the recognition that libraries have limited capacity to monitor vendor compliance with license terms for user data privacy. What are possibilities (vendor attestation, audit, third-party certification, library testing, etc.) and what is feasible? This session will serve as an opportunity for a candid discussion of the challenges libraries face in licensing for privacy and needed resources and possibilities for approaches to monitoring compliance.