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Feature g


also query service availability at different times, security incidents, user preferences for, say, HTML, PDF or Readcube, look at vendor downtime and gauge student success versus library use. As McCann highlights: ‘Libraries can


choose to keep a user anonymous, but they can track the urls that a user is coming from and going to, and these will contain information such as the user’s platform, the subject’s title and whether a PDF or an image is being looked at.’ Clearly a resource such as EZproxy


Analytics is set to help librarians tackle the challenge of using and communicating such data. However, past research has, time and time again, shown that libraries in higher education must communicate such data as a means to demonstrating value and showing how the library contributes to student success.


McCann said: ‘One of the challenges that libraries have is that they need to be able to essentially speak the language of the administration, so that they can match the library’s activities to the institution’s mission... but there has been some breakdown regarding this communication.’ Indeed, while libraries often work with, say, other student learning groups, learning analytics still take place without the library’s input or data. So McCann believes that collaboration between different groups on campus is crucial. ‘We are actively talking to librarians and asking them questions, such as how is it that you want to work with us, which stakeholders do you want to collaborate with, what is the data that you want to communicate and how do you want to communicate it? ‘We have this data that we can [analyse]


using EZproxy and package up in a way that it can be easily communicated to an administration.’


Analytics ethics As academic libraries warm to learning analytics, the thorny issue of privacy remains. Due to sensitive data practices,


Before


Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, University of Illinois


Steve McCann, OCLC


these learning measures clearly challenge student privacy and raise intellectual freedom issues, so how should the library professional respond? Earlier this year, Professor Kyle Jones, from the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University- Indianapolis published an article, Just because you can doesn’t mean you should: Practitioner Perceptions of Learning Analytics Ethics, in Portal: Libraries and the Academy. Jones pointed out how analytic possibilities created by granular data and information flows raise ethical questions, with student privacy rights being a key concern. ‘Given that students have neither the opportunity to consent to learning analytics, nor much (if any) control over how their institutions use identifiable data about them, concerns have grown that learning analytics might deleteriously affect student autonomy, due to paternalistic or institution-centric technological designs or both,’ he wrote. Echoing past research, his analyses also highlighted a lack of ethical guidance for librarians, and a need to document and


After


address the potential harms and benefits of learning analytics, so that practitioners could work through the ethical unknowns. Professor Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, from the University of Illinois Library, agrees. As she puts it: ‘User privacy is a very long- held value in libraries, so this question of user data immediately raises questions of how do we negotiate the tension between privacy, which seeks to protect people from scrutiny, and wanting to understand people’s experience, which depends on tracking.’


And, as she adds: ‘We have this


continuous call for training... time and time again, I hear librarians say: ‘I feel like I need to understand more about how these two things interact’. And how do I, as an ethical practitioner, align my work to both values?’ Given their concerns, Jones and Hinchliffe joined forces to apply for a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian grant, from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, to develop an education programme for librarians to address these learning analytics issues. They won, and Prioritizing Privacy: Training to Improve Practice in Library Analytics Projects is now underway. Prioritizing Privacy is described as


EZproxy analytics makes it easy to get actionable insights 6 Research Information December 2019/January 2020


a three-year continuing education programme that will teach academic library practitioners about privacy and other related ethical issues associated with learning analytics. It aims to provide librarians with structured experiences to reflect on ethical issues intentionally and purposefully, and support the development of privacy protections for their own learning analytics projects. As part of this, Hinchliffe intends to look at intentionality, transparency and consent. On intentionality, she believes librarians need to be well-informed of the


@researchinfo | www.researchinformation.info


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