[Web4lib] Academic libs - allowing anonymous comments on your site?

[Paul Pival]

We recently enabled comments on our news posts, and last week had a profanity-laced one that reminded us that we maybe should have a policy in place around "discussions", so I went hunting and found David Lee King's policy at http://www.tscpl.org/about/comments/discussion_guidelines/ which we modified slightly for our environment (http://library.ucalgary.ca/services/library-policies/community-discussion-guidelines).  We allow anonymous comments, but do moderate, and have received only a handful in total in the past 2-3 months.

Paul R. Pival
Public Services Systems Librarian
401D MLT
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4

Phone: (403) 220-5650
Fax: (403) 282-1218

This email sent from my account on the Exchange Pilot 


-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org [mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Melissa Belvadi
Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2010 9:16 AM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: [Web4lib] Academic libs - allowing anonymous comments on your site?


Hello. My library is about to engage in an internal debate regarding
whether we should enable the ability of anonymous users to post comments
to any of the pages of our web site. Our site is based on Drupal, so the
feature is very easy to enable. We are assuming that we will moderate
comments (they don't appear until approved), which is also easy with
Drupal. 

I have some practical concerns about how much staff time the moderation
process (including the inevitable internal debates regarding what should
and shouldn't be allowed through) will take up, as well as philosophical
concerns about librarians getting in the business of censoring and what
damage there might be if someone whose post we disallow makes a public
ruckus about how the library is anti-free speech. 

But my concerns may be unfounded, so I'd like to hear any experiences,
positive or negative, that other academic libraries may have had doing
this. 
Do any of you have anything like this on your sites now? Did you try it
and later remove the feature? 

Also if you know of any studies, conference presentations, or the like,
on the subject, pointers would be most appreciated. 

Thanks for any help and advice you can provide! 

---
Melissa Belvadi
Emerging Technologies & Metadata Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca
902-566-0581 


_______________________________________________
Web4lib mailing list
Web4lib at webjunction.org
http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/