Software Security and Your Library

In part 1 of our last blog post we looked at how Softlink IC protects our products. Part 2 of this blog will show you how you can secure and protect sensitive data, documents and resources or modules in Liberty.

Protecting Your Data

With a better understanding of how we protect our products, let’s look at some tactics to secure and protect sensitive data, documents, resources or modules within Liberty.

Establishing appropriate access levels is essential because we care about the user experience and your organization’s privacy. Let’s dive in and see four ways you can manage security, permissions and access in Liberty:

1. Anonymous Access
Liberty has numerous parameters for personalizing your catalog. One key access parameter can enable or disable searching by anonymous users or visitors to your homepage. This option prevents users who are not logged in from accessing your catalog via the search page and is perfect for libraries that want to restrict their catalog to users in their organization or similar. You can also put in restrictions around IP addresses if required.

2. Hiding Bibliographic Types (BibTypes)
Administrators can use BibType configurations to control access to resources cataloged in Liberty. BibTypes can be configured to be ‘hidden’. Once hidden, the underlying resources will be inaccessible via a search. Hidden resources will still be present in the management interface for users with access to the management module. This is great for hiding a specific group of resources that you don’t want users to search on.

3. Role-based Access
User Roles and User Privileges determine the access to Liberty’s menu options and functions. Typically, library users will only require access to the Search interface whereas library staff will likely have varying access based on their duties. These access levels are dependent on the tasks your users are required to perform, but best of all, they’re easily configured! Role-based access is critical for restricting access for your users to just the areas they need to work in.

4. Security Groups
Another fantastic approach for limiting access to your catalog’s resources is with Liberty’s Security Groups. Security Groups can be created and tied to User Roles to enable specific resources to be restricted from view in a search by specific users such as library borrowers (as opposed to borrowers who are library staff). This works well for libraries with a variety of records and information that is sensitive and not accessible to all.

We take the security of our customers’ data seriously. This glimpse into how Liberty achieves this security gives our customers confidence their data is safe with us. Additional information on these features can be found in Liberty’s Help interface. If you need any help or would like to learn more about these features, just contact our super Support Team.

We strive to push the limits with Liberty’s capabilities, and we prioritize our features based on the needs of the user. For those who would like to know more about Liberty, you can contact us here.