INFO 657 Student Project

Technological advances have led to a proliferation of digital libraries over the past decade or so. These offer valuable opportunities for convenient access to information and data, regardless of an individual's location. For librarians though, the transition from physical to digital library collections brings many new challenges, not least in the areas of security and privacy. The purpose of this article is to examine the nature of these challenges and the opportunities available for overcoming them, so that libraries can continue to fulfill their important role of providing accurate, secure and timely information to users, while protecting their privacy and the confidentiality of their personal information. The article addresses in particular the following issues: protecting the information infrastructure; identification and authentication in security and privacy; standards and policies; access and control of digital information; ethical decision-making in design, implementation and evaluation of digital libraries; and privacy, anonymity and identity. The article concludes with consideration of the future prospects for security and privacy in digital libraries.

The single-most crucial cybersecurity issue facing the international governance community is systemic, society-wide digital insecurity brought on by the digitization of society and global connectivity. This is not merely one issue—it is the issue. Citizens, consumers, businesses, and even government agencies seem powerless to protect themselves as their confidential, proprietary, or personal digital communications and data are hacked.
The international community must not stand by as a “new normal” develops—an environment in which daily data breaches, digital identity theft, ransomware attacks, and the weaponization of information are passively accepted. We need a society-wide paradigm shift on digital security for everyone and everything.
This paradigm shift must start with the recognition that, in the global digital ecosystem, everything we say and do is captured in digital form. As we rapidly move toward the Internet of Things (IoT), a vast range of physical objects, from doorbells and toothbrushes to surgical instruments and aircraft, are being digitally connected. The connectivity of everything, combined with the transborder nature of the internet, means that instantaneous extraterritorial cyber reach is available to criminals, governments, terrorists, and anarchists alike.
This combination of factors makes both states and ordinary citizens vulnerable in unprecedented ways. National security experts—who have traditionally focused on norms to constrain states’ offensive use of weapons—have not yet determined how to provide security in this interconnected, digitized environment, where anyone, anywhere, can attack anyone or anything, anywhere else.