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

Tue Mar 16 16:22:55 EDT 2010

Another option would be to enable an authentication module in Drupal -- we run an open forum for campus called Viking Village (http://vikingvillage.wwu.edu) and use the CAS module to tie it in to our campus single sign on environment, which makes it easy for people to get in (they don't even have to login if they are coming from the campus portal) and comment, but doesn't allow anonymity.  OF course, this limits traffic to campus, but that is intentional.  We do allow users to set up profiles, which allows them to assign themselves semi-anonymous names, but we always have access to their real username on the back end.  Drupal also has LDAP and Shibboleth modules that can be used to tie into your campus authentication system...

Our forum is a different animal, but we stay on top of comments / complaints about the library and the results have always been good.  For example:  http://vikingvillage.wwu.edu/node/7964.   We also have pretty awesome guidelines for participation (see the left sidebar on the link in the previous sentence), which would be overkill for a commenting area on a library website, but could provide some usable content for you as well.

Also, before we had the forum we had a big event called "14 days to have your say" (http://lib206.lib.wwu.edu/14days)  which encouraged people to tell us what they thought about the library, and it was pretty great!  We received complaints and new ideas.  We responded, implemented some changes based on suggestions, and got a lot of positive response from all over campus about the project.  

We don't moderate ahead of time, though we do moderate the forum with student moderators now as traffic is pretty high and content can get pretty crazy --  I really doubt you'd see that on a comments area of the library site, though, and we had absolutely nothing objectionable on the 14 days project, which was completely open for 14 days and had hundreds of posts.  

Andy Peterson
Head of Library IT
Western Washington University Libraries
516 High St. 
Bellingham, WA 98225-9103
(360) 650-3894 (phone)
(360) 650-3954 (fax)
andrea.peterson at wwu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org [mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Paul Pival
Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2010 9:22 AM
To: Melissa Belvadi; web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: Re: [Web4lib] Academic libs - allowing anonymous comments on your site?

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 

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