You might have noticed that online privacy and digital security are big topics of discussion these days. They’re in the news everywhere, with reports of criminals breaking into online databases and stealing private data from millions of users, concerns over terrorists using modern communications and Internet technologies to keep strategy and planning safe from the eyes of the militaries...

Instead, library workers of today are faced with an overwhelming number of technological threats to online privacy and security. Even recognizing and classifying different types of threats—as this chapter will attempt to do—is a Sisyphean task: new threats emerge over time, and they are protean, constantly changing in nature and number. This chapter might well have been titled...

In addition, the lines around the edge of the library have been blurred. No longer just a physical location where users go to read or borrow physical items, today’s library is better pictured as a node in a network. Extending out from the library are numerous connections to the outside world via online catalogs; subscriptions to online journals and periodicals; ebooks; websites; links to...

Matthew Connolly is an application and web programmer at Cornell University Library, where he has worked for more than ten years on a variety of library services and tools for the public and library staff. He holds a master’s in engineering from Cornell, specializing in systems engineering. He has published articles in both popular and peer-reviewed journals and coauthored...

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