Queens Public Library offers blogs, ratings, reviews, comments, and other social software tools for educational, cultural, and recreational purposes. Library social software tools provide a limited (or designated) public forum to facilitate the sharing of ideas, opinions, and information about library-related subjects and issues. Library social software is intended to create a welcoming and inviting online space where library users will find useful and entertaining information and can interact with library staff and other library users.

Social software is defined as any web application, site, or account offered by the library that facilitates the sharing of opinions and information about library related subjects and issues. Social software includes such formats as blogs, listservs, websites, social network pages, or posts to community reviews and customer ratings of library materials.

While the Queens Public Library encourages an open forum, posts and comments are moderated by library staff. The Library reserves the right, within its sole discretion, not to post and to remove submissions or comments that are unlawful or violate this policy.

Rules for Commenting and Posting

  • Posting offensive, obscene, threatening, or abusive content is strictly prohibited. The Library will remove comments that contain abusive, vulgar, offensive, threatening, or harassing language, personal attacks of any kind, or offensive terms that target specific individuals or groups. Individuals are fully responsible for libelous or defamatory comments.
  • Hate speech will not be tolerated. Posts containing racism, homophobia, sexism, or any other form of hate speech will be removed from the Library’s site.
  • Don’t include personal information. The Library strongly encourages individuals, especially people under the age of 18, from posting personal information about themselves (ex. last names, school, age, phone numbers, addresses, etc.), and reserves the right to remove any posts with personal information about other people or that violate a third party’s right to privacy.
  • Stay on topic. Comments and posts should be related to the issue or topic discussed.
  • Duplicate posts from the same individual are discouraged.
  • Spam and commercial content will be removed. The Library will remove posts or comments used for political and commercial purposes or for soliciting funds. Gratuitous links to sites are viewed as spam and will result in the comment being removed.
  • Copyright Violations. Individuals should not post anything that they do not have the right to post. The Library follows a notice and takedown procedure for complaints of copyright violation under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
  • The Library is not responsible for any of the patron–generated comments/content that appear on the website(s). A posted comment is the opinion of the poster only, and publication of a comment does not imply endorsement or agreement by the Queens Borough Public Library.
  • Users may report concerns. Moderators will endeavor to review those concerns as soon as possible. In some instances, we will not have the resources to review user comments and posts, but we do reserve the right to edit or delete user comments and posts in a manner consistent with our mission and policies. The Library will not remove all posts that have been reported and the Library cannot respond individually to every report.

By choosing to comment you agree to these rules.