Dean Adriene Lim of the UO Libraries will step down in July This message about the departure of Adriene Lim, dean of Libraries and Philip H. Knight Chair, was sent by Provost Banavar to faculty and staff in the UO Libraries. May 28, 2019 Dear Colleagues, I am writing to…
Posts tagged as “Adriene Lim”
The link is here, courtesy of an anonymous correspondent. Duck athletics used to contribute $50K a year to the library. With football revenue increasing so quickly it’s getting hard to spend it all on coach’s salaries, now seems like a good time for Library Dean Adriene Lim to hit up Athletic Director Rob…
MEMORANDUM Date: April 6, 2016 To: All UO Colleges, Schools, and Departments From: Adriene Lim, Dean of Libraries Subject: Collections Reduction Review, 2016-2017 The UO Libraries must prepare for cuts to our collections budget of approximately $565,000 in FY 2016/2017. This figure represents an actual cut of $115,000 in our…
Over the summer former Interim President Coltrane enacted three emergency IT policies. The administration is now looking to make them permanent, and is asking for feedback. My own initial reaction, as someone that Coltrane’s administration tried to fire over the UO Presidential Archives release (and he did fire two others) is…
6/5/2015 update: The RG editorial board, here:
Prosecutors make right call, DAs won’t charge man who leaked Kitzhaber’s emails:
But a scolding is all Rodgers will get from the governor and the DAs. Brown said she hoped that no criminal charges would be filed. The prosecutors fulfilled that hope, saying in their statement that “justice would not be served” by charging Rodgers.
Meanwhile Interim UO President Scott Coltrane is still refusing to reconsider his decision to fire UO Archives Director James Fox, who simply told his staff to follow standard UO archives procedures when I requested a copy of the UO President’s digital archives.
6/2/2015 update: Governor Brown says Kitzhaber whistleblower prosecution should end
Willamette Week has the story, here:
Gov. Kate Brown says the man who leaked former Gov. John Kitzhaber’s emails to WW should not face criminal charges.
Brown says she believes state IT manager Michael Rodgers acted to protect public records after Kitzhaber’s office requested in February that about 6,000 of Kitzhaber’s emails be deleted from state computers and based on what she’s read, his actions were not criminal.
“I think it’s fair to say this decision was an extraordinary act made in an extraordinary situation,” Brown tells WW. “It was something he did based on the lack of trust in the system around him. His intentions were good.”
Rodgers went public with his story last week: He first prevented the emails from being deleted, and then copied them and gave them to WW after concluding someone might still try to remove the records from state servers.
Page down for the parallels between Rodgers and UO Archivist James Fox, who has lost his UO job because interim UO GC Doug Park went wacko after he learned that Fox had approved my request for a copy of the UO Presidential Archives, and I posted a “confidential” memo written by former GC Randy Geller advocating the dissolution of the UO Senate.
Interim President Coltrane called Fox’s actions “unlawful” and he has refused to reconsider the firing, despite a petition from 136 UO faculty, an editorial from the RG editorial board, a letter from UO donor Ursula Le Guin, and many other letters in support of Fox including one from the AAUP – Oregon.
Meanwhile Library Dean Adrien Lim and Associate Dean Andrew Bonamici have still not released their sanitized version of the archives, or explained what they are going to do about the many documents on important public matters that have apparently been deleted from UO’s archives by the UO President’s office.
5/27/2015: The man who wouldn’t delete Kitzhaber’s emails, and a UO archives update
5/11/2015 update:
The new policy, apparently rushed through in response to the UO archives release, is here:
Unless required by law, patron information is not to be given to non-library individuals, including parents, friends, professors, university administrators, police, FBI, university security staff, or the CIA.
The old policy said:
Patron information is not to be given to non-library individuals, including parents, friends, professors, university administrators, police, FBI, university security staff, or the CIA. Only a court order can require the disclosure of patron records.
The question is who decides what is required by law. The American Library Association’s recommended policy is very clear – nothing should be disclosed until a court requires it:
The Council of the American Library Association strongly recommends that the responsible officers of each library, cooperative system, and consortium in the United States:
1. Formally adopt a policy that specifically recognizes its circulation records and other records identifying the names of library users to be confidential. (See also ALA Code of Ethics, Article III, “We protect each library user’s right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received, and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted” and Privacy: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights.)
2. Advise all librarians and library employees that such records shall not be made available to any agency of state, federal, or local government except pursuant to such process, order or subpoena as may be authorized under the authority of, and pursuant to, federal, state, or local law relating to civil, criminal, or administrative discovery procedures or legislative investigative power.
3. Resist the issuance of enforcement of any such process, order, or subpoena until such time as a proper showing of good cause has been made in a court of competent jurisdiction. 1
1 Note: Point 3, above, means that upon receipt of such process, order, or subpoena, the library’s officers will consult with their legal counsel to determine if such process, order, or subpoena is in proper form and if there is a showing of good cause for its issuance; if the process, order, or subpoena is not in proper form or if good cause has not been shown, they will insist that such defects be cured.
At UO, Library Dean Adriene Lim released the records because the university’s interim general counsel Doug Park asked her to. It appears that Oregon State is now ready to do the same. Will the ALA quietly go along with this?
5/6/2015: Proposed UO Library privacy policy lets admins snoop through circulation records, Coltrane won’t release Walkup report, Library Dean Adriene Lim won’t let ALA release her emails or letter on archives
This has some interesting parallels to the debate over the Counseling Center’s privacy policy.
4/20/2015: The original title of this post was Klinger says archivists “resigned”, Coltrane got Rudnick to rewrite Walkup’s report on Archives release, no followup from Coltrane on deleted docs. As explained below, on 4/3/2015 I retracted my statement that Interim President Coltrane got Sharon Rudnick to rewrite Amanda Walkup’s report on…
As might be expected, the Society of American Archivists has compiled a thorough bibliography of news stories about the UO archives release, here. I’m still waiting to see if UO Library Dean Adriene Lim will waive the $210.63 public records fee and show what she and external reviewers had said…
3/17/2014 update: I went to the Library Committee’s meeting today. Dean Adriene Lim was adamant that she was not trying to avoid Senate review of the new library privacy policy, and that as far as she was concerned the Library Committee was the Senate, since it’s a Senate committee, but that she was fully willing to go through the regular Senate policy on policies.
She said had been told that AVP Chuck Triplett was the “guru” for UO policies, and so she asked him how to proceed. As you can see below, Triplett thought that there was no need for this privacy policy to go through the Senate process. Given that the administration’s motivation for this policy arose out of LibraryGate, or as they now call it, “the incident”, Triplett should have known better than to advise Lim to try and slip this through on the side.
This is from the OSU library’s privacy policy:
Patron information is strictly confidential. It is for the use of library staff only; it can, of course, be divulged to the patron. Patron information is not to be given to non-library individuals, including parents, friends, professors, university administrators, police, FBI, university security staff, or the CIA. Only a court order can require the disclosure of patron records. The university librarian is responsible for compliance with such orders.
Needless to say UO’s proposed new policy (in full below) is a lot weaker:
When a violation of law or established policy is suspected, the Libraries reserves the right to electronically monitor its public computers and network, and/or reveal a user’s identity to institutional authorities and/or law enforcement.
Frankly, it reads as a post-hoc justification for Lim’s decision to disclose my circulation records to the administration. I told Lim I thought this would be problematic, and that she should at least consider having something concrete to take to the Senate about implementing the promises that were made to the Senate about general review of UO’s public records problems, or perhaps something about the documents that were *not* in UO’s Presidential Archives – e.g. athletics money deals – and therefore were lost to history (yes, I did mention Hillary Clinton).
FWIW, the RegisterGuard report on that Senate meeting is here.
… The UO’s new dean of libraries, Adriene Lim, told the gathered faculty on Wednesday that she considers an individual’s right to privacy to be a universal human right.
But she also said that Oregon public records laws “spell out types of records that should be public and available for scrutiny. I’d be the first one to advocate for that openness and transparency.”
Coltrane and Lim said the issue of transparency will be reviewed by university officials after Hershner Hunter completes its investigation. [UO M: I’ve made a public records request to Dave Hubin’s Public Records Office for the contract showing what UO’s Interim General Counsel Doug Park has asked HH to do. No response yet.]
The university will “try to increase openness and transparency as much as we can,” Lim said. Coltrane said he’d bring the university’s Office of Public Records to the table.
Harbaugh said Wednesday that that’s what he had in mind when he sought the presidential documents at the archive – after being thwarted by the public records office.
He said he had no intention of violating student privacy laws or damaging the university.
“I’m trying to make a point about the university’s obsessive secrecy, about how it functions, makes decisions and operates as a public agency,” Harbaugh said.
3/12/2014: AVP Chuck Triplett advises Library Dean Adriene Lim that new Library privacy policy can bypass Senate review
Thanks to several people for leaking this email and proposed policy to UO Matters. Page down to see how it evolves as it gets exposed to the light of day. It’s now circulating on the Senate listserv, and we will be taking steps to
a) ensure Dean Lim does not implement this policy without Senate approval, and
b) ensure Chuck Triplett is monitored, to prevent future attempts to subvert the Policy on Policies.
Still no information on how Lim will deal with public records that were removed from the Presidential Archives by Johnson Hall.
The UO Board reaffirmed the PonP just last week. Triplett didn’t waste any time breaking it:
Date: March 11, 2015 at 9:20:07 AM PDT
To: Adriene Lim
Subject: Library privacy policy draft – latest version
Dear ULC members,
I’ve heard back from Chuck Triplett and he advises me that he doesn’t think our new Privacy Policy rises to the level of an “institutional policy.” This means that the draft would not need to go through more layers of review in the way that other institutional policies are reviewed. He thinks that, after we go through our library-level review, the policy can just be posted on our website.
Library faculty still have until March 16, 2015, to provide input and comments, but I wanted to share with you the latest version of the draft because it contains two new sections that were added last week: 1.) a section was added to address the security cameras we have in our Special Collections & University Archives area. These cameras are not new — they’ve been in place for a while, but the Libraries had not finalized a policy regarding them yet); 2.) a few sentences were added to address the privacy audit and compliance concerns that were raised at our last ULC meeting. When the policy is finalized, the Libraries will conduct an audit of systems and services to make sure that we are complying with our own policy.
If you have any final comments about this latest draft, please let me know by March 16, 2015. Thank you for your help with this.
Best regards,
Adriene
Adriene Lim, Ph.D., MLIS
Dean of Libraries
Philip H. Knight Chair
University of Oregon Libraries
1299 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1299
Phone: 541-346-1892
Email: [email protected]
Note: After I sent this email to Lim and cced the Senate listserv, she sent out an email changing her mind and deciding to ignore Triplett, and send this policy through the regular PAC process, which will bring it to the Senate.
Here’s the policy in dispute:
2/18/2015 update w/ response below. 2/17/2015: Looking for documents from the UO Archives? Be prepared to justify your request to UO Library Dean Adriene Lim. This restrictive language was recently added to the Archives webpage, here: University Archive Finding Aids Permanent University Archive public records are available for research, and…
1/29/2015 update: Rich Read of the Oregonian reports on Wednesday’s UO Senate meeting, here: … Harbaugh sees both farce and tragedy in his latest episode, LibraryGate. He called Coltrane’s email alleging unlawful release of records “outrageously premature judgment on his part, and I’m assuming Tobin Klinger wrote it – but I can’t be sure…
1/22/2015 Presidential Archives records release investigation update: FOR INTERNAL-LIBRARY USE ONLY Dear Library staff, faculty, administrators, As you read in President Coltrane’s recent message, we have recently learned that significant numbers of archived records have been released, despite the fact that some of these records contained confidential, private, and sensitive…