Privacy Policy

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The CCA Libraries’ strive to respect our patrons’ right to privacy while delivering the highest possible quality materials and services. The goal of this policy is to be as transparent as possible about what data we collect, how we manage it, and what other services we work with.

Our Data

The library catalog tracks basic personal information (name, phone number, email), your currently checked-out items, fines that are owed to the library, and your reading history. Your history can be erased and the catalog can be told to stop tracking your reading history once items are returned to us.1

The libraries collect anonymized data related to the use of our websites and services via Google Analytics. We occasionally conduct user research for the purposes of improving our web presence, including surveys and interactive usability tests. We record a variety of data related to our many services, such as information literacy instruction, inter-library loan, and reference questions. In terms of personally-identifiable information, these records contain an email address and name at most. We may share aggregated versions of the data, such as charts on the library data page, but will not share records which include personal information.

The Libraries also oversee administration of VAULT, CCA’s digital archive, and a variety of online learning platforms.2 All of these collect student works and retain personally identifiable information. In VAULT, student work is typically visible only to faculty within the appropriate academic program, though some may be shared with a wider audience. In our online learning platforms, course work is visible only within the course. For example, a blueprint created in an Integrated Building Design course and contributed to VAULT is, by default, visible only to Architecture instructors, but if it wins an award then the work might be visible to the whole CCA community. If you have a question about who has access to an item in VAULT, email vault@cca.edu.

It is the goal of the Libraries to keep data only as long as it remains relevant to us. For instance, user interviews about our website are kept for a year or until we summarize them into an action plan. You can request that data associated with you be deleted by contacting us. As long as the data is not operationally necessary for the libraries, we will remove it. Sometimes, as is the case with VAULT and our online learning platforms, we retain data on behalf of one of CCA’s academic programs and we must consult with that program before modifying or deleting data.

Third-Party Services

The Libraries subscribe to numerous commercial, third-party websites which provide valuable research sources and pedagogical tools. Wherever possible, we do not sacrifice your right to privacy when we purchase access to a website. However, we cannot control the actions of external companies and they may track your activity on their sites. In particular, if you create an account with a third-party site it is subject to their privacy policy and not ours.

Here are several of the privacy policies of companies that we work with:

If you have a question about a third-party website and its data or privacy policies, please contact a librarian. We would be happy to perform the research necessary to find an answer.

References & Useful Links

Notes

1. Our library catalog tracks your reading history but this can be turned off such that immediately after you return an item, it is no longer associated with your account. Follow these steps:

  • Sign into your library account
  • Visit the tab “your privacy”
  • Change the dropdown option to “Never” and select Save
  • Additionally, the red Immediate Deletion button erases the previously stored reading history

You can also delete your search history in the catalog–which is only tracked as long as you’re signed in—by visiting the tab “search history”, selecting all searches with Select all, and then selecting Delete all. ↑

2. The online learning platforms either currently in use at CCA or used in the recent past include:

Course work submitted to these sites is typically visible only to the instructor and system administrators, though there are exceptions. While Moodle is run by CCA and does not share data with external parties, the other items on this list are all hosted by other organizations which do retain access to the data you upload.  ↑