Contracting for Privacy: Library Licensing and User Data Considerations

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 and has released two resources thus far: (1) View from Library Leadership, findings from research on how user privacy concerns are informing academic library leaders’ strategies in negotiating with vendors, and (2) The Vendor Contract and Policy Rubric, which can be used to evaluate how well a given vendor platform follows library privacy guidelines, standards, and best practices, and to use advocates 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, and the need to develop campus partnerships to work collaboratively to protect reader privacy and information security.