Ryan O'Hora

Hello, my name is Ryan O'Hora and I oppose this bill. HB 273 aims to give parents access to their minor child's library records but leaves no room for guidance on how staff, directors, managers, etc will provide this information. A staple of public libraries is privacy, confidentiality, and a place to be. Altering our current law will start an erosion of values and overall mission our libraries pride themselves on. There are plenty of alternatives to altering a privacy and confidentiality law (as we know how important our privacy and confidentiality is so important to our modern society). Some alternatives include, parents coming to the library to check out material with their children, parents talking with children about what they are reading at the library, parents reading to their children, family library cards that are in the parent's name and permissions granted to children to use the singlular card. In the grand scheme, I have yet to have problems with families and children privacy/confidentiality, but I could imagine this change to the law will have drastic effects on librarians and broken families that come to use the library. This proposed bill offers now guidance on how to work with parents, grandparents, and children that have sole custody, or other legal parameters that librarians do not need to manager or should. There is no feature that libraries have nor should have to mark a child's account with "legal guardian A has these rights, and parent B stipped of these rights". From a macroscopic level, mostly all New England states have the same current law as New Hampshire.