POST: The Right to Be Forgotten

Geoffry Rockwell (University of Alberta) has pointed to an essay from Cheryl Trepanier and Toni Samek (both also at the University of Alberta) that introduces recent approaches to the “right to be forgotten” debate with regard to the role of libraries.

Trepanier and Samek note that as a profession librarians advocate for access to information while being committed to protecting patron privacy, causing a tension when faced with the principle of the right to be forgotten:

Inherently, the distinction between “information owner” and “information subject” comes into play here, but introduces the even larger question of when does information posted on the Internet become a public good?

In his brief note, Rockwell muses, “This tension has struck me as an important in the library field and digital humanities as we develop the infrastructure to digitize and preserve all sorts of public and private materials we wouldn’t have before.”