The ILS Without Patron Data

Last month, I sat with the problem of personal information in our library systems. I've wondered for a few years whether it was possible to run a library automation system without patrons' personal information, and in FOLIO I think it is possible. I made three blog posts out of these thoughts:

The ILS without patron data: a thought experiment (https://dltj.org/article/ils-without-patron-data/) ... how we can use pairwise-identifiers—identifiers that have meaning only between an organization's identity provider and the library system—to create pseudo-anonymous users. It also describes the kinds of services that will be required by the identity provider to do things like send circulation notices.

The ILS without patron data: a thought experiment realized with FOLIO (https://dltj.org/article/ils-without-patron-data-folio/) ... looks at the FOLIO API to see what would need to change to support pairwise-identifiers. Fortunately, not much needs to change! A few APIs will need different implementations and a few new APIs would be needed, but no breaking changes to the APIs to support this!

The ILS without patron data: open questions (https://dltj.org/article/ils-without-patron-data-details/) ... closes some loose threads, describes some limitations, and looks ahead.

The second post was a pleasure to write and speaks to the strengths of the FOLIO architecture. First, that users are "first-class" entities in FOLIO. In previous library systems that I had worked with, patrons are just records that have some sort of side authentication with PINs or something similar. In FOLIO, a patron can log into the API and do things. Second, the clear separation of concerns using APIs is very helpful...the email notification module needs to change to take pairwise-identifiers into account, but it keeps the same API contract so other modules that send notices don't need to change!

I'm hoping I'm not missing anything and I would love to hear from others what you think about a plan like this.