Never fear, library patrons. Your  identities are safe!

Well, at least they will be as soon as an employee of the Coos County Library Service District erases the pesky information from the database.

Concerned about the growing problems with identity theft in Coos County and the United States as a whole, the district’s board of directors agreed to halt a nearly 17-year-old practice of gathering Social Security numbers from patrons who apply for new library cards. Those already in the system will be permanently wiped away from the district’s database, shared by eight public libraries.

“We will never put that in the system again ever,” said Gary Sharp, the director of the North Bend Public Library.

The board is made up of directors from the district’s public libraries, which include Lakeside, Dora, Bandon, Myrtle Point, Powers, Coos Bay and North Bend, as well as Southwestern Oregon Community College.

Sharp, who was in on the decision when it was made late last month, said providing Social Security numbers was optional for patrons. The digits were used only to prevent the duplication of library card records — ultimately to prevent errant patrons from getting new cards without paying old fines. However, the practice has made librarians nervous as of late. They feared keeping information as sensitive as Social Security numbers in the library database seemed like a security breach waiting to happen for hungry identity thieves.

“We’ve never had any records stolen from our database. But, if it ever happened, the thief would not be able to get any Social Security numbers,” Sharp said.

Patrons won’t likely notice the change, nor will it mean an inconvenience for the libraries themselves. Staff still can prevent duplicate records by checking patrons’ names, said Nancy Price, the database administrator for the library district, who is removing the Social Security numbers from the system.

Price said she didn’t know how many will have to be removed, but expects to be done with the job by mid-November. There are more than 80,000 names in the system, including those of organizations, but not every individual and entity provided Social Security numbers.

The database administrator is using software to target and remove the information, without forcing her to go into each and every file.

“It’s not a difficult job. It’s tedious but not hard,” Price said.

She doesn’t mind the extra work and understands the philosophical reason behind the move, she added.

“Over the last 10 years, as a population, we have become much more sensitive to the protection of personal information,” she said.