The short version
Cookies
This site sets two cookies, both of them for counting visits. Nothing here advertises to you, follows you to another site, or knows your name.
The two cookies
Both belong to Google Analytics, which is how we see which pages actually get read.
_ga, which lasts two years. It holds a random number, and that number is what lets Google Analytics tell that two page views came from the same browser. It is why somebody who reads four pages is counted as one reader rather than four._ga_4LHX223LZE, which also lasts two years. The same idea, narrowed to this site: it keeps the state of your visit, so opening a second page reads as the same visit continuing rather than a new one starting.
Neither one carries your name, your email address, or anything you have typed. There is no advertising on this site, no retargeting, no social pixels, and no sign-in on the public pages, so there is nothing else to remember about you between visits.
What we do with the numbers
We read them to work out what is worth writing more of: which books get looked up, whether anybody finds the blog, what kind of device people are on, and roughly which city or country a visit came from. They are usage patterns, not people. Alongside Google Analytics we also run Ahrefs Web Analytics, which is built to work without cookies and stores nothing in your browser at all. Both run only on the public pages of this site.
The exceptions, for completeness
- The librarian's desk. The admin area of this site sits behind a Cloudflare Access sign-in, which sets a session cookie in the librarian's own browser. It is not part of the public site and you will never meet it.
- Our host. Cloudflare can set a short-lived security cookie if it needs to check that a request is coming from a person rather than a bot. On this site it is not currently doing so.
- Links out. Google Maps, Instagram, WhatsApp, and the old WordPress archive all set their own cookies once you are on them. That is between you and them.
Refusing them
Every browser can block or clear cookies, and nothing on this site will break if yours does: the pages, the catalogue, and every link on them work exactly the same without them. Google also publishes a browser add-on that opts you out of Google Analytics on every site at once. What we record and what members' records contain is set out on the privacy page.
Published , updated .