IPTT Digital Library, Institute of Pastoral and Theological Training, Egbe, Nigeria.
Effective 27 October 2026.
This policy explains what the IPTT Digital Library records about the people who use it, why it records it, who can see it, and how long it is kept. The library is run by the Institute of Pastoral and Theological Training (IPTT) for its students, faculty and staff.
Your account. Your name, the email address the library has on file for you, and your role (student, faculty, librarian or administrator). If you sign in with Google, the library also keeps the account number Google gives it, so that nobody else can use your account if an email address is later given to someone else. If you choose a username and password, the library keeps the username and a scrambled form of the password; the password itself is never stored.
Your profile. The phone number, church and town you enter, and anything optional you add: a WhatsApp number, state or region, year or class, role in ministry, and a profile picture.
Your use of the library. When you sign in and out, failed sign-in attempts, the questions you ask the Study Assistant, the searches you make, the books you open, and the library pages you visit.
Your bookmarks, notes, highlights, and reports. The library keeps the pages you bookmark, the place you stopped in each book, your research notebooks and their share links, your highlights, and any problem you report about a book. A notebook is private until you make a share link for it. Then anyone signed in to the library who has the link can read it, until you stop sharing it. The library keeps these records while you have a library account. Library administrators can see these records, and the librarian can also see the problems you report. Books you save for offline reading are kept on your phone, not on the library server. On a shared phone, always press Sign out when you finish. That removes your bookmarks, unsaved notes, and offline books from the phone.
Reading plans. Your reading plans are kept with your library account so they follow you to any phone or computer. If a teacher assigns you a reading plan for a course, that teacher and the library’s administrators can see, for that plan only, how many of its sessions you have marked as read, how many were due, whether you are behind, and the date you last marked one as read. While you are in that teacher’s class assignment, the teacher can also see the questions you ask the Study Assistant, with your name and the date, but not the answers. Teachers never see a message that suggests you may be at risk, or a question about personal matters. In the books of that plan, they can also see how long you spend on each page in the library’s reader (counted only while the page is on your screen and you are using the reader), so they can tell whether the reading was done. They cannot see your other reading plans, your notes or bookmarks, your searches, or the pages you open in other books. A teacher may remove you from an assignment, which deletes your copy of that plan; when an assignment ends, your copy is kept, archived, so you can still open it. You can delete any plan you made yourself at any time.
Evening reading reminders. If you tap “Remind me each evening” under Today’s reading, the library sends that phone one notification at about 6 pm (Nigerian time) on days when a reading plan shown on your home page has a reading due that you have not marked as read. For each phone, the library keeps your username, the phone’s notification address and the encryption keys your phone gives it, whether it is an iPhone, an Android phone or a computer, a scrambled tag of the sign-in you were using, and when reminders were turned on and last delivered. You can turn reminders on for up to 5 phones; a sixth replaces the oldest. The library also notes once a day that it checked your reminders, and deletes that note after 30 days. The notification says only that you have reading due; it does not name the plan or the book. Teachers cannot see whether you have reminders on. To stop them, tap Turn off on the same line, press Sign out, or block notifications for the library in your phone’s settings. The library then deletes that phone’s record. It is also deleted if your account is closed or the phone stops accepting notifications. If another student signs in on a phone you used, your reminders are switched off on it; they never go to that student.
Messages that suggest you may be at risk. If you write to the Study Assistant that you are thinking of ending your life or harming yourself, your message is not sent to any outside service and is not saved as a shared answer. You receive a reply at once with Nigeria's emergency number, 112, and the name of an IPTT staff member you can speak to. The library records that this happened: your username, your name, and the time. It then sends a WhatsApp message to named IPTT staff members, giving your name and the time and asking them to contact you that day. Your words are not included in that message. Library administrators can read your message in the record of questions, which is deleted after 12 months like other questions. The record that the alert happened is also deleted after 12 months. The library does this so that someone at IPTT can help you in person.
Books you borrow. For the printed library: the book, your name and contact details, the dates it was lent, due and returned, any late fine and what has been paid, and whether you agreed to WhatsApp reminders.
Staff actions. When library staff create or change accounts or record loans, the library records which staff member did it.
Coursework checked for originality. An instructor may upload a student's written work to compare it with the library's books and journals. The text of the work, the student's name if the instructor enters it, and the result are kept on the library server until that instructor or an administrator deletes them, and are deleted automatically 12 months after the check. The comparison runs on the library's own computer; the work is not sent to anyone else.
Every instructor and administrator can see every check. Your work is compared only with the library's own holdings, not with other students' work or the internet. It is not included in the library's backups kept outside IPTT. The report shows passages that your work shares with library books; it does not decide whether anything was copied. That judgement is made by your instructor. You may ask to see a check of your work, or ask for it to be deleted after your work is marked, by writing to Admin.Library@ipttegbe.com.
When you sign in with Google, Google confirms your email address and Google account number to the library. The library uses them only to check that you are on its list of readers and to sign you in. It does not ask Google for access to your email, contacts, files or anything else in your Google account.
To let you in and keep accounts secure, to lend printed books, to see which questions go unanswered and which books are used so the library can be improved, and to report to IPTT's leadership how the library is used.
IPTT library administrators can see all of the information above. The librarian can see accounts, profiles, sign-in records and loans, but not the questions you ask or what you read. A teacher can see only what is described above for the reading plans that teacher assigns you. Other students cannot see your information.
When the Study Assistant writes a new answer, the question and its answer are saved without your name, so that anyone who asks the same question later receives the same answer.
The saved answer is found by the wording of the question. Other readers do not see who asked first, and they cannot see your list of questions. Because the wording of your question is kept as part of the saved answer, it is not deleted after 12 months with your other records. It is kept for as long as the library is in use and is included in the library's encrypted backups. If you put a name or a private detail into a question, it may remain in the saved answer. To have it removed, write to Admin.Library@ipttegbe.com and give the question you asked.
You can see your own past questions on the My questions page.
Anthropic. New questions are answered with the help of an artificial intelligence service provided by Anthropic. The text of your question and passages from library books are sent to Anthropic to write the answer. Your name and email address are not sent.
Anthropic is a company in the United States, and your question is processed there. Anthropic states that it deletes questions and answers sent through its service within 30 days, that it keeps them for up to 2 years only if its safety systems flag them, and that it does not use them to train its artificial intelligence models. Please do not put your name, another person's name, or private details in a question. When Anthropic's service cannot be used, the library's own computer writes the answer instead, from the library's books alone.
Google provides the sign-in described above.
WhatsApp, run by Meta, carries library reminders about books you borrow: when you borrow a book, before it is due, on the due date, and when a late fine is added. The message contains the book's title, its due date and any fine, and goes to the WhatsApp number on your profile. Staff may send these by hand; automatic messages go only to readers who have agreed to receive them. Agreeing to these reminders is required to borrow printed books. You can switch them off on the My books page or your account page; while they are off you cannot borrow printed books.
Library messages come from a number in the United States that shows the name "IPTT Library." Replies to that number are not read; contact the library office instead. Meta receives your WhatsApp number and the text of each message in order to deliver it, and handles them under its own terms. The library also uses WhatsApp to alert named IPTT staff when a reader may be at risk (see "Messages that suggest you may be at risk"). Those alerts go to staff phones, not to you, and contain only your name and the time.
Phone notification services. Reading reminders are delivered by the notification service of your phone or browser: Google (Android phones and Chrome), Apple (iPhone), Mozilla (Firefox) or Microsoft (Edge on Windows). The service receives the phone’s notification address, the time, and the message, which is encrypted so the service cannot read it. These companies are outside Nigeria and handle this under their own terms.
Tailscale carries connections from your device to the IPTT library server. The connection is encrypted, and Tailscale's relay servers cannot read it.
Backblaze, a data storage company, holds backup copies of library records. The copies are encrypted on the IPTT server before they are sent.
The library does not sell your information and does not use it for advertising.
Records of sign-ins, questions, searches and reading are deleted after 12 months. After that the library keeps only monthly totals, which contain no names and no questions. Your account and profile are kept while you have a library account. Loan records and records of staff actions are kept as library records. A phone’s reminder record is kept only while reminders are on for that phone (see “Evening reading reminders”).
The library sets a cookie in your browser to keep you signed in, for up to 30 days or until you sign out. Staff pages may set one more for the same purpose. Google's sign-in button sets its own cookies when you use it. The library itself sets no advertising or analytics cookies.
You can see and correct your profile at any time on the My account page. To ask for a copy of your information, for a correction you cannot make yourself, or for your account and records to be deleted, write to Admin.Library@ipttegbe.com. The Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 gives you these rights.
If you are not satisfied with the library's answer, you may complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (ndpc.gov.ng).
If this policy changes, the new version will be posted on this page with a new effective date.