Privacy and Data Use

Privacy Policy 

Yale Library follows the privacy policy of Yale University.

What is personal data? 

Personal data are any information which relates to a living person, and from which that person can be identified. Sensitive personal data are defined as information about racial or ethnic origins; political opinions; religious or philosophical beliefs; trade union membership; physical or mental health; sexual life; and criminal allegations, proceedings, or convictions. 

• Personal data that carry over from records in other Yale University systems:  These data include: Name, email address, physical address, telephone number, degree, major, gender, birth dates, ethnicity, University affiliation, and campus organization involvement. 

• Personal data that are provided by you to do business with us:  These data include: Name, Net ID, email address, telephone number, physical address, research topic of interest, University department, and funding sources for transfers between Yale University departments. 

• Personal data provided by social network applications:  We may collect personal data based on your social network account privacy settings.  These data can include your social network ID, name, and geographic location. 

• Aggregated usage data from Google Analytics:  These data do not include any personal information.  They only provide an overall picture of traffic on our website, such as what percentage of visitors from the United States spent more than 10 minutes on our site. 

• Lawfulness:  We only process your data when we have identified a lawful basis for the intended personal data to be used; 

• Fairness:  We make our best efforts to ensure not to use your data in any unjustified way or in a manner which may have adverse effects on you; and 

• Transparency:  We make our best efforts to provide you detailed information on how the Yale University Library uses your personal data. 

• Fulfill user-requested services and resources and 

• Conduct our internal business processes. 

• Learn how to provide you with a better user experience on our website; 

• Monitor system performance; 

• Monitor system security; 

• Determine the value of our services based on usage; and 

• Improve our internal processes and workflows. 

We do not sell your data to anyone, and we do not use them to sell anything to you. 

Data we share with 3rd parties 

Every time you visit our website, we record details such as your IP address, the website that brought you to our site, the type of browser you use, the pages you view, and the date and time of your visit.  No personal data, such as your name, is recorded.  These records are sent to tools such as Google Analytics for analysis. 

Some of our websites, such as http://guides.library.yale.edu and http://ask.library.yale.edu are hosted on 3rd party platforms.  We make every effort to contact these 3rd parties and ensure that they conform to Yale Library's data use policy. 

Keeping your data up-to-date 

We have a responsibility to ensure that the personal data which we process is accurate and up-to-date. Please help us to do this by ensuring that your personal details are kept up-to-date in systems such as Your Library Account. 

Data Retention 

We only retain your personal data for as long as they are essential to a legitimate business interest of the Yale University Library. 

Data Security 

Your data are secured on the Yale University network. Please refer to the Data Classification Guideline (1604.GD.01) for more information.

We use encryption to protect your data every time we collect them on our website. 

Newsletters and mailing lists 

You may receive messages from us because you are subscribed to one of the Yale University mailing lists.  We always include a link in our mailings that allows you to unsubscribe from the list.  You can manage all your subscriptions at https://subscribe.yale.edu/.

More information 

For more information, please contact libraryit@yale.edu.