Tonight I participated in the Security Roundtable. The panel, Having our Cake and Eating it Too: Reading Room and Access Policies, sought to give audience members tangible solutions to security concerns.
I kicked off the panel with a discussion of a security and access review my department has been doing over the past year.
So what did we do:
1. Implementing 1 combined, registration and manuscript request form (avoids researcher form fatigue).
2. Providing researchers with 1 folder rather than 1 box or cart at a time in the reading room.
3. Curators page and reshelve collections, which helps us to better understand what collections and materials are being used, which informs digitization and preservation practices.
Alvan Bregman from the RBMS group spoke next and he suggested framing policies using positive language:
1. Lockers = personal privacy, rather than searching your person on the way out.
2. Focus the reference interview to learn more about the researcher, rather than an interogation.
3. Rules that apply to researchers should apply to staff to- E.G. no bags past the reception desk.
Michael Knight and Richard Fine from NARA discussed the ADDI training philosophy That they applied to theft prevention:
Analyze, Design, Development and Implement. For those sites with limited resources, simply writing out your policies can go a long way toward implementation. Communicating changes and planning for those changes, increases by-in among staff.
The discussion that followed highlighted for me that while security practices don’t necessarily bring in the donor dollars, it’s a central part of the work we do. In other words, Security is Sexy.