Librarians in uproar after borrowing record of teenage Haruki Murakami is leaked

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/02/librarians-in-uproar-after-borrowing-record-of-haruki-murakami-is-leaked

by bootload • 11 years ago

129 64 11 years ago

Paul_S• 11 years ago

Once the book is returned isn't it enough to record it in aggregate and remove the record from the personal file? Maybe they should change the way they keep records. Or is that a police thing from way back that requires them to keep a record of all the books you have borrowed. In which case I'm one step ahead as I spent my highschool in the library and almost never checked anything out. They will never find out all the terrible fantasy and sci-fi novels I read.

msbarnett• 11 years ago

Once the book is returned isn't it enough to record it in aggregate and remove the record from the personal file? Maybe they should change the way they keep records.

These records are ~50 years old, pre the computerization of library borrowing records.

It's a fair bet record keeping has changed in the intervening decades.

mc32• 11 years ago

So the Kobe daily dismisses the criticism by essentially claiming he's a public figure and thus fair game but also admit to not obtaining consent from the other book borrowers.

On the other hand, the information was obtained and "leaked" by someone who stumbled upon the library cards while disposing old books and ancillary things from an old library.... It reminds me of the cardfile case in New York[1] somewhere that brought insight into the lives of adolescents/young adults who attended some special preparatory kind of institution for kids but whose history had almost completely been lost...

[1]http://www.slate.com/articles/life/permanent_record/features...

waterlesscloud• 11 years ago

Why would this record even exist? What purpose does it serve?

dec0dedab0de• 11 years ago

Library books used to have a little pocket stuck to the back cover, with a lined card inside. If you wanted to borrow a book, you would take out the card, put your name on the next line, and give it to the librarian. When you gave the book back, the card was put back into the pocket.

The system was to keep track of who had borrowed a book, so that they could be tracked down if it was not returned.

I remember it being really fun in grade school, to realize I had checked out the same book as an older friend.

gcb0• 11 years ago

I'm from a more metropolitan area i guess. we used library card numbers on those instead of names

lfowles• 11 years ago

Or to check out books that you didn't remember checking out before!

zardo• 11 years ago

I always enjoyed seeing the names of people who had read a book before me at the university library, and seeing how long it had sat on the shelf between readers. It was like joining a secret club that spanned generations.

pmoriarty• 11 years ago

"In early 1943, Ulam asked von Neumann to find him a war job. In October, he received an invitation to join an unidentified project near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The letter was signed by Hans Bethe, who had been appointed as leader of the theoretical division of Los Alamos National Laboratory by Robert Oppenheimer, its scientific director. Knowing nothing of the area, he borrowed a New Mexico guide book. On the checkout card, he found the names of his Wisconsin colleagues, Joan Hinton, David Frisch, and Joseph McKibben, all of whom had mysteriously disappeared. This was Ulam's introduction to the Manhattan Project, which was America's wartime effort to create the atomic bomb."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaw_Ulam

slyall• 11 years ago

Picture of a Library card:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Library_card.jpg

The Browne Issue System appears to be what most small libraries used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browne_Issue_System

electricblue• 11 years ago

The studio ghibli movie, Whisper of the Heart has a plot point that revolves around this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_of_the_Heart

danso• 11 years ago

Given that Murakami is 66-years-old, I imagine that the school he went to used paper and pencil/ink to record transactions, and like most school libraries, failed to hire someone properly certified in data retention regulations who would have properly disposed of those records...I'm only being half-facetious here..I think you're wondering if there is some machination resulting from a mass surveillance policy at play here...it could be something much more innocent: papers that are just stashed away in a school's storage room:

The cards were apparently leaked to the paper after a volunteer who once taught at the school came across them while he was sorting out old library books that were to be thrown away.

The reason why we don't hear about these kinds of data leakages is because paper usually gets thrown away. Or a building burns down/floods. And also, paper records don't come up in a Google search (which is the extent of "research" for many people today).

Why didn't the school back then have a policy of throwing away cards after x number of years? Probably for the same reason why anything was done before computers became so ubiquitous...we constantly underestimate how the power of computation and networking changes the accessibility of information. Back when I graduated from college (and by this time, Google was a major player), no one really complained about printing people's names (i.e. mostly students) in the police blotter. Now, I believe it is a rarity for a school newspaper that publishes online to also publish full names of the suspects, even though no federal/state laws have been passed that would require such discretion. The reason why this practice is now rare is pretty common-sensical to us today, but not so much when Google was still relatively new.

bitJericho2• 11 years ago

Why would anybody want this information destroyed. Protected until the person is long dead sure, but destroyed? A lot can be learned by seeing what experiences someone has had. Would you not want to read what Plato had read? How about Jefferson or Tesla?

cobaltblue• 11 years ago

It lets the police track down murderers, at least according to the plot of Se7en...

alex_doom• 11 years ago

I love the comment someone left on that article.

---

Haiku of the Week:

When I eat deep-fried oysters, I am lonely, But they are delicious.

Only Haruki-san can do this without trying. But not without frying.

yongjik• 11 years ago

I'm not sure how I feel on this. On one hand, privacy is important, but on the other hand, if someone stumbled upon a reading record of teenage Goethe or Twain, no scholar would say "It's their privacy! We shouldn't look at them!"

celticninja• 11 years ago

Differences being your examples are dead and someone stumbled across them. This is a car of a live author having his details leaked.

stevesearer2• 11 years ago

Does that hold up in the modern sense of internet browsing history? If someone stumbles across my browsing history, they cannot publish it while I am living, but can once I am dead?

Sounds like Haruki Murakami should have installed uBlock Origin and that the library shouldn't have enforced a real names policy :)

iamsohungry• 11 years ago

Goethe and Twain are dead. Murakami is still alive.

nsns• 11 years ago

I find "Librarians in uproar" a wonderful oxymoron.

sliverstorm• 11 years ago

It's not an oxymoron so much as the sort of thing Monty Python could have done a great sketch about :)

monroepe• 11 years ago

Makes me chuckle just thinking of the potential.

eli• 11 years ago

It's amusing choice of phrase, but librarians have been very vocal on privacy and civil rights historically.

flashman• 11 years ago

And yet, I've never heard librarians question whether they should be retaining borrower records. If I don't trust the government not to abuse those records, why would I trust some other group of civil servants? Why do librarians still need to know I borrowed a book more than, say, a few days after I return it? If they need analytics, why can't they anonymise the borrower ID?

paulgb• 11 years ago

"WHAT DO WE WANT?"

"Shhhhhhhhh"

hoodoof• 11 years ago

You sir, are a genius.

sageikosa• 11 years ago

Japanese librarians at that.

Seriously, I am married to a librarian. Since it's a service sector job (and often a government one at that), they tend to be in uproar in private.

That they are in public is good policy in this regard; lest they lose patronage as confidence in the confidentiality of their patrons knowledge exploration is diminished.

greggman• 11 years ago

Just an FYI but the Japanese take their privacy far more serious than many in the west are used to

Examples:

Check Japanese Facebook accounts. 99% of them have no pictures of themselves nor is their profile pic a picture of themselves

Japanese don't use selfie sticks to take pictures to brag. They use them to not have to ask a stranger to take their picture. See paragraph above

In Japanese law it is illegal to take pictures of people in public without their permission. Not enforced for crowds but it is the law

Trade shows booths will often have "no pictures" signs which are respected in Japan and would be ignored I most western countries

Nearly all hotels in Japan have porn but you can pay for it by using a cash based vending machine in the hallway. It gives you a card with a code you type into the tv. It therefore doesn't show up on your credit card or hotel receipt

You have always been able to buy almost anything on the Internet with cash in Japan. You order and choose to pay with one of the many 3rd party payment systems. You're given a code. You go to the nearest convenience store and use a machine there to print out a barcode page (or print it yourself). You hand it to the clerk who scans it and takes your money. The item is now paid for. The merchant knows what you ordered but the payment company has no info on you.

Japan was the only country to get in a tizzy over google street view issues.

I bring all those up just to point out that the Japanese have a vastly different attitude toward privacy

stephaniepier• 11 years ago

I can assure you this is an issue librarians feel very strongly about. I've worked at a number of libraries and all of them would only retain borrowing records if the patron requested it.

ohyes• 11 years ago

librarians are very vocal about privacy and freedom of expression issues. This does not surprise me at all.

lazyant• 11 years ago

They were one of the first in the post-9/11 US to denounce government agencies getting data of library users, I remember the FBI first denying it, now after all we know about government surveillance is small potatoes.

dates• 11 years ago

actual list is behind a japanese paywall here ^_^

http://www.kobe-np.co.jp/news/bunka/201510/0008458279.shtml

krapp4• 11 years ago

The scholarly value of these records is obvious, but I don't see much of a public interest angle behind publishing them. Is the Kobe Shimbun hoping its readers will wonder whether or not this famous writer had some controversial or salacious reading habits? Why not get his permission and at least try to get an interview putting them into some context?

intopieces• 11 years ago

The scholarly value of these records is obvious

Is it? Just because someone checked out a book doesn't mean they read the book. And just because they read a book doesn't mean they liked it, remembered it, or were influenced by it.

This information has no context. I see no value in them whatsoever.

krapp4• 11 years ago

Fair enough, maybe "obvious" is too strong. "Arguable," maybe, or worth considering.

zck• 11 years ago

Has anyone asked Murakami what he thinks? It certainly shouldn't determine what's moral or not, but it would be very interesting.

hackuser• 11 years ago

It's interesting that records, such as library books read, that were common before the modern Internet are considered private, but if the records are related to the Internet, such as web pages read (or every place I go, everyone I talk to, everything I say, etc.), many people say they don't understand why their privacy is important.

fraserharris• 11 years ago

There is a subtlety involved:

- people care if other people know what they have read

- people care much less if a machine knows what they have read

noobermin• 11 years ago

I think this sums up the attitude of most of those confounded young'un Millennials, myself included.

I like the idea that Youtube remembers the videos I've watched so that it rec's others, it's a useful feature of the site. The fact that someone else, a person, could see that information, that is upsetting. It's probably difficult to have one without the other, however.

threatofrain• 11 years ago

I also look at how much potential is in the environment for consensus on my issues. I feel like if I cry aloud about people snooping into library records, I can reach high consensus on this issue with others. I will be able to tap into the energy of the environment.

But if I cry aloud about online / computer tracking, I believe I will get a very mixed response. Some people will stand with my issue, but too many will simply be bored with my issue. I don't think the environmental potential energy for this issue is strong enough.

That people would raise a cry over one issue and not another is not sufficient to diagnose their internal wants. It may also speak to their assessment of (probability) x (magnitude) of success.

tzs• 11 years ago

Library records were not necessarily all that private.

When I was a kid/teen, each book in the county library had a card in a pocket glued or taped to the inside front cover of the book. Your library card had a metal plate on it embossed with your library card number. To check out a book you took it to the checkout counter, they took your library card and the card from the book, and used a machine that printed your library card number and the due date on that card from the book [1]. They kept that card, and put a card in the book that told you the due date.

When you returned the book, they would put that original card back in the pocket and return the book the the stacks.

Note that if you could obtain my library card number, then you could find out if I had checked out a particular book by simply finding that book on the shelves and looking at the checkout card to see if my library card number was printed on it. You could even tell when I checked it out because the due date would be listed. The card had enough room to store records from a couple dozen checkouts.

I think that this didn't bother people because it took some work to get the information. First, you need the target's library card number. One way you could get that would be to have someone watch me when I come out of the library and try to get a good enough look to identify a book I've checked out. Then wait until I return the book and it is back on the shelves, and you can get my number from the card.

Once you've got the card number, you now have to start looking in books for it. If you are trying to see if I'm reading books on a particular subject, you might reasonably look at all books on that subject, but if you are trying to get a general picture of all my reading that is going to be a big hassle.

A lot of things were like this--the data was not particularly protected or kept private, but because getting it required going to some particular place and trolling through printed records generally only people who had a really good reason to want it would go to the effort.

[1] Similar to the way credit cards worked back before electronic card readers.

kencausey• 11 years ago

There was a time before library card numbers. My public library was still having you sign the card when I was young. As I recall they jumped directly from that to keeping track of lending digitally.

randyrand• 11 years ago

Citizens in uproar at librarians for keeping unanonymized decode long records!

p.s. I do not know who actually makes the decision to keep records....is it law in japan?

unsignedint• 11 years ago

I feel there's some political agenda to this uproar. Librarians and/or librarian organization in Japan are have reasons for concerns as there are some movements in munincipalities delegating operation of their public libraries to commercial enterprises. This is causing bit of concerns for expecations of privacy for patron's checkout record.

Company called Culture Convenience Club, operator of large book/media chain Tsutaya, now operates some public libraries in Japan, which basically runs both a library and a book store in the premise; and patron can optionally associate their store card with library card, so each checkout from libraries would count toward their in-store point, I guess in return for the record they will keep about that checkout. (There have been some questionable book selection/discard policies some take as conflict of interest, but that's another story...)

So I feel, at least partially, they are using this as opportunity to increase public awareness of their position.

Librarians in uproar after borrowing record of teenage Haruki Murakami is leaked

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