That seems to be the only thing that I ever hear about it. Library books. What?? Uhmm... big deal? I remember when library books had check-out cards in the front cover and all you had to do to see who'd ever checked out a book was to look and the card and there's the name and date of everybody that had checked it out. Big Whoopie.
Yeah, as far as I know, those records were ALWAYS available by court order. As far as I know--I think I've looked into this more than the average person, but by no means as thoroughly as some--the vast majority of stuff in the Patriot Act is merely assembling laws already out there into a framework of tools to be used to ferret out terrorists AND, more significantly, to update laws about phones and landlines for the cellular age. It's one of those oogah boogah scares that Bob Barr seems to need to make noise about since his career as a politician collapsed. He's one of those advertisements for term limits, as far as I'm concerned.