Professor talks about USA PATRIOT Act's effect on libraries

Of all the applications of the USA PATRIOT Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism), the least expected may be its use to track and observe reading habits of library patrons.

The act, passed in 2001, expands surveillance and investigative powers of law enforcement agencies. While it does not specifically refer to libraries, the act has been used to obtain library users' circulation records — a reminder of a past era, says Maurice Wheeler, who is a UNT associate professor of library and information sciences, a former public library administrator and an expert on privacy and records issues for these types of institutions.

"For more than 25 years librarians endured the Library Awareness program, a counterintelligence program during the Cold War that tracked the library use of people primarily of Eastern European or Russian descent," he says. The program ended in the late '80s.

The PATRIOT Act's similarities to the Library Awareness program are especially relevant to UNT, which has one of the largest library holdings in the Dallas-Fort Worth region and a School of Library and Information Sciences that educates hundreds of librarians each year.

Wheeler says the guidelines of the PATRIOT Act grant FBI agents more authority to examine patrons' reading and web-surfing habits and prohibit alerting anyone that the FBI is investigating them.

"There are two values that keep people coming through library doors each day — trust and dependability," Wheeler says. "Not only do they depend on libraries to provide access to the materials and information they need, but they also trust that they can conduct their business in the library with a certain level of privacy and confidentiality."

The School of Library and Information Sciences has created courseware about PATRIOT Act privacy issues for Texas libraries.

BY RUFUS COLEMAN rcoleman@unt.edu

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• TAMS gets $87,000 grant from TI Foundation
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