From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 20:53:42 -0600

IT staff? When you're talking about university presses, as Joe was, I
daresay with few exceptions only the larger presses have anyone on
their staff dedicated to IT issues.

Sandy Thatcher


At 8:48 PM +0100 2/13/14, LIBLICENSE wrote:
>
> From: Ken Masters <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 07:50:51 +0100
>
> Hi All
>
> I think Joe is correct.  And I think part of the reason is that, in
> huge organisations, so much responsibility has been handed over to IT
> staff, that very little of what they do is known to senior management
> (apart from the IT staff who serve in senior management, of course).
>
> This is a very real problem, because senior management tends to
> classify everything to do with computers as "IT stuff," and fails to
> see that what their IT staff does reflects directly on the
> institution, especially when institutional ethics are involved.   In
> this case, the IT staff will know that they are collecting data, but
> it is likely that the senior management don't know about it.  (For
> example, how many librarians on this list have ever asked their IT
> staff about what information they are gathering on their users, how,
> where and for how long the data are stored, and discussed the ethics
> of that?).
>
> To answer your question regarding instances of tracking by
> organisations: I don't know of any, but the study of such tracking by
> medical organisations that I mentioned in my previous mail can be
> found at http://ispub.com/IJMI/6/2/14386
>
> I attempted to follow up on that study by surveying the medical
> organisations, trying to get their opinion on how much they knew about
> the data gathering, and how this fitted in with medical ethics (given
> that there was almost no informed consent on the data gathering).  I
> received a 1% responses rate, so, obviously, could not publish
> anything.  Apart from normal low response rates to surveys, I would
> think that the non-response rate probably had to do with
> organisations' closing ranks, or, because it would have been seen as
> "IT stuff," would have been forwarded to the IT dept, and they
> certainly would not have responded.
>
> Regards
>
> Ken
>
> ------
>
> Dr. Ken Masters
> Asst. Professor: Medical Informatics
> Medical Education Unit
> College of Medicine & Health Sciences
> Sultan Qaboos University
> Sultanate of Oman
> E-i-C: The Internet Journal of Medical Education
> ____/\\/********\\/\\____
>
>
>
> On 12 February 2014 16:57, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>  From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
>>  Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2014 08:49:37 -0500
>>
>>  Ken,
>>
>>  No quarrel with anything you have here, but you are looking at this
>>  from the point of view of the end-user, which is only part of the
>>  equation.  What has caught my attention is that some organizations
>>  (and I am thinking in particular of universities and university
>>  presses) may be collecting data without knowing it or at least without
>>  their staff knowing all the implications.  That's how I interpret Eric
>>  Hellman's earlier comment.  I am still investigating this and would
>>  certainly like to know if anyone can cite instances of tracking and
>>  data collection by such organizations.
>>
>>  Joe Esposito