TY - JOUR AB - Purpose The problem of privacy protection in digital libraries is causing people to have increasingly extensive concerns. This study aims to design an approach to protect the preference privacy behind users’ book browsing behaviors in a digital library.Design/methodology/approach This paper proposes a client-based approach, whose basic idea is to construct a group of plausible book browsing dummy behaviors, and submit them together with users’ true behaviors to the untrusted server, to cover up users’ sensitive preferences.Findings Both security analysis and evaluation experiment demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, which can ensure the privacy security of users’ book browsing preferences on the untrusted digital library server, without compromising the usability, accuracy and efficiency of book services.Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper provides the first attempt to the protection of users’ behavior privacy in digital libraries, which will have a positive influence on the development of privacy-preserving libraries in the new network era. VL - 36 IS - 6 SN - 0264-0473 DO - 10.1108/EL-07-2017-0162 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-07-2017-0162 AU - Wu Zongda AU - Zheng Chengren AU - Xiejian Jian AU - Zhou Zhifeng AU - Xu Guandong AU - Chen Enhong PY - 2018 Y1 - 2018/01/01 TI - An approach for the protection of users’ book browsing preference privacy in a digital library T2 - The Electronic Library PB - Emerald Publishing Limited SP - 1154 EP - 1166 Y2 - 2024/04/25 ER -