policies for patron-created content and web accounts

[Nina Mchale]

Greetings, all, and apologies for cross-posting:

I am looking for examples of policies/procedures/guidelines that govern
patron/user created library web site content. If you have an official
policy, and wouldn't mind sharing, please send it to me (whether attached
as a document or link) off-list. If there's interest, I'll happily
summarize for the group. Would love to hear from public libraries
especially, but academics/specials/everyone too.

Other things we'd like to know:

1. Do you require administrator moderation for user-generated content?
2. If you allow/require users to create web site accounts, do you limit
account creation to your library users only, or can anyone create an
account and add content?
3. If you do require user verification, how do you accomplish that?
Manually? Automatically against the ILS?
4. Do you delete user accounts after a period of inactivity? If yes, how
long?

Our situation: we currently allow anyone to create an account in the
public-facing Drupal site, but the result, no surprise, is that we have
hundreds of junk/spam accounts and only a few legitimate users writing book
reviews. We want to clean up the user data in the database, but also have
some guidance/governance moving forward to prevent this in the future. We
also want to keep the process easy for the legitimate users who want to
create content, especially because the current iteration of the site was
designed to encourage user-written reviews, and we do have a handful of
people who write nice, even multi-lingual, reviews. I want them to feel
that it's easy to contribute, but on the other hand, I'm pretty sure user
"Canadian-Pharmacy-RX" isn't interested in talking about the bestseller
s/he just read...

Thanks in advance!

Nina

Nina McHale, MA/MSLS
Assistant Systems Administrator
Arapahoe Library District
milehighbrarian.net
Facebook & Twitter: @ninermac

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2011-11-22
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