Many libraries have posted notices saying that because of the law, they cannot protect the privacy of patrons' reading habits.
In 2004, American librarians recoiled at the FBI's demands to rummage through their patrons' reading habits and use them to infer terroristic intent, and at the FBI's gag orders preventing librarians from telling their patrons when the police had come snooping.
The European touch comes with the ambience: patrons reading newspapers (for sale at a front-door rack), or magazines (available at the entrance) at six tables on the corner of Main Street and Parker Avenue, as they bite into their sandwiches or sip their coffee, within ear-and eye-shot of the George Washington Bridge.
Indeed, the Society's list of international patrons reads like a 'Who's Who' of American right-wing hawks.
A group of Canadian psychologists led by Tara MacDonald recently went into a series of bars and made the patrons read a short vignette.
Soon the names on Andrews's list of patrons read like a Who's Who of New York society: Harriman, Lamont, Frick, Colgate.
The bar captured a fast retreating moment in the evolution – some may say devolution – of the Lower East Side, a time when patrons read those books and flocked for documentary screenings and poetry nights.
The 70-seat computer center is often packed as patrons read news, watch YouTube videos and scour the Web for jobs.
Its patrons read newspapers in Hebrew, English, French, Spanish and Russian, and their talk was heavily political, ranging from elections to the gun battles between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian police that have raged during Atara's final days.
(And one of our core professional values so strong that we've been known to fight the FBI over it is keeping private what our patrons are reading or researching). Of course we hope scenarios like those described in the article are few and far between!
