Privacy
Ensuring privacy of participants was a key objective in the design of TRAILS. The following assurances are in place.
Students
No identifying information on students is collected. To be able to report individual student outcomes, TRAILS provides school library media specialists the option to assign a pre-generated random code to each student. The TRAILS database maintains student results identifiable only by that random code.
School Library Media Specialists
To be able to use TRAILS, a school library media specialist must create an account which asks for name, email address, school name, city, state, zip code, school type, and grade level. In addition to allowing for reports to be sent to the account holder, this information is maintained by TRAILS to identify characteristics of participating schools. Individual account information is secured and will not be available, nor shared, with any third party; nor will identifying information on a given school or district be reported or be made available.
Research
TRAILS does maintain the right to use data in the aggregate for research and publication purposes. This will follow the research guidelines in place at Kent State University.