“We want to obey the law, but our first priority is to protect the rights of our students,” she says. “The librarians have a national code of ethics, and one of the main tenets is that they protect the rights of the reader...One of the priorities was to talk about how can we continue to protect the rights of our researchers and the rights of our students.”
Certain of the Library’s ideological principles are inviolable, Verba says. The University would flatly refuse to take books off its shelves, even if asked by federal authority.
And Harvard has followed the lead of many other libraries in changing its practices so that there is less information for governmental requests to turn up.
Librarians no longer archive borrowing records. Instead, they keep electronic records only as long as books are checked out and deleted immediately when returned.
Considering that no requests have yet been reported within the library system, such a measure stands only as an advanced precaution.
“I think, to be honest, that was slightly more symbolic,” Verba says.
—Staff writer Nathan J. Heller can be reached at heller@fas.harvard.edu.