[Sigtis-l] NYTimes.com Article: The Librarian's Web Dilemma

Thu Jun 20 11:54:52 EDT 2002

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Another article about the neverending discussion about libraries and the web

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The Librarian's Web Dilemma

June 20, 2002
By JOHN SCHWARTZ 

GREENVILLE, it seemed, was plagued with pornography. In the
12 public libraries serving the city and its county in
South Carolina, adults were looking for pornographic images
online and didn't care who saw them - and, by some
accounts, were showing the images to children passing by. 

"We had parents say, `I'll never bring my child back to
your library,' " said J. David Sudduth, chairman of the
Greenville County library system's board. "It was a very
unhealthy environment." After other measures proved
ineffective, the board decided to spend $2,500 a month on a
filtering service that blocks access to millions of Web
pages with adult content. "It just took that last step for
us to get the kind of environment we want for our library
system," Mr. Sudduth said. 

About 150 miles away, in the DeKalb County suburbs of
Atlanta, another library system tried a different tactic:
shame. With its computers in plain sight, it decided to
have librarians enforce clearly posted rules against
downloading pornography with a firm tap-on-the-shoulder
approach. "Handling it the old-fashioned way, with people,
has worked best for us," said Darro Willey, the library
director. "It's just a common-sense approach." 

But in Virginia Beach, librarians decided that privacy, not
policing, was the most practical approach. Monitors of
computers are recessed beneath the surface of glass-topped
desks, with a plastic hood further restricting the view.
Carolyn Caywood, a branch librarian, had concluded that
urban areas like Virginia Beach are not "villages" where
shame might work magic. 

"The larger the community, the more likely you are to get
people who are exhibitionists," upon whom embarrassment has
no effect, she said. 

Each library system says its approach is meeting its needs
- and that, librarians say, is the most important lesson of
the pornography wars. "Because libraries are so deeply
rooted in their communities, librarians have the best read
on their communities and how to approach the issues around
Internet access," said John W. Berry, who stepped down this
week as president of the American Library Association. 

And for now, at least, the decisions will continue to be
made at the local level. Three weeks ago, the latest
Congressional effort to deal with the issue, the Children's
Internet Protection Act, was blocked by a three-judge
federal appellate panel in Philadelphia. While sympathetic
to the goals of the law, which required libraries to
install Web filters or risk losing federal funds for
Internet access, the judges found the filters were too
crude to avoid blocking unobjectionable material that
library patrons have a right to see. The case is expected
to go to the Supreme Court. Aside from the federal effort,
a growing number of state and local governments have moved
to require filters, a trend that librarians have joined
forces to combat. 

"Libraries have always been about giving people choices,
not restricting them," said Maurice J. Freedman, the new
president of the library association and director of the
Westchester County library system in New York. 

The federal filtering law and other government attempts to
limit Internet access have failed so far because the
Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that adults should not
be limited to seeing only what is appropriate for children
if there are less restrictive alternatives. 

In the ruling striking down the filtering law, Edward R.
Becker, chief judge of the Court of Appeals for the Third
Circuit, wrote that technology could not yet clear that
constitutional hurdle in shielding children from
pornography. "Unfortunately, this outcome, devoutly to be
wished, is not available in this less than best of all
possible worlds," he wrote. 

So with the issue back where librarians say it should be -
at the local level - libraries face two issues: protecting
children from stumbling onto pornography while surfing the
Web and dealing with adults who seek out materials that are
either blatantly obscene or at least inappropriate for
children. 

Libraries tread cautiously in this area. Those that appear
to do too little risk coming under attack from
anti-pornography groups and parents. Filter too
aggressively, however, and civil libertarians are likely to
sue. When the library board in Loudoun County in northern
Virginia instituted a tough Internet use policy that
included a filtering requirement, civil liberties groups
sued, and in 1998 a federal judge declared the policy
unconstitutional. The library board voted not to appeal. 

In Greenville, Mr. Sudduth said, groups had also threatened
to sue the library system if it imposed filtering, but no
one actually did so after the filters were adopted. "We
worked hard on issues of censorship and intellectual
freedom," he said. The library system also ensured that
there was one unfiltered machine in each library - "kind of
a relief valve," he said, that could be used by people who
had unsuccessfully tried to reach legitimate sites on the
filtered machines and brought the issue to librarians. 

"We tried to put together a very reasonable policy that
balanced the First Amendment with protecting our
community," Mr. Sudduth said. 

The emerging standard for libraries - and an approach
recommended in a recent report from the National Research
Council on protecting young people online - is to give each
user a choice of whether filters will be turned on or off
at any machine. That option is still a bit expensive and
technologically daunting for many libraries, but more and
more are offering it. 

At the regional libraries serving Fort Vancouver, Wash.,
the choice of filtered or unfiltered Internet is tied to
the user's library card number, which is entered whenever
an online session begins. Parents can specify whether
filters must be used with their child's account or can
choose not to allow Internet access at all, said Candace D.
Morgan, the system's associate director. She said that the
system eliminated a problem faced by patrons when the
library has one bank of computers with filters and another
without. "You shouldn't have to declare to the world what
you're doing by what terminal you sit down at," she said. 

But David Burt, a longtime anti-pornography campaigner and
a spokesman for N2H2, a company whose filtering systems are
used in Greenville's libraries and others, maintains that
the Fort Vancouver solution is only a partial one. "It does
address the biggest concern most people have, which is to
protect their own children," he said, but "it doesn't do
anything to address people accessing child pornography" or
trying to expose others to it. 

"I hate to sound self-serving here, but I think filtering
is the best approach," Mr. Burt said. He compared
unfiltered Internet access in libraries to "having Hustler
placed next to Highlights" on the shelf. "From a
common-sense approach, it makes more sense to deal with the
pornography problem before it comes into the libraries," he
said. 

The problem with exhibitionists, said Mr. Willey in
Georgia, is that the issue shifts from censorship to bad
behavior. And while librarians debate whether
tap-on-the-shoulder enforcement of Internet use policies is
an invasion of the user's privacy, they all say that bad
behavior predates the Internet by generations, whether the
problem is unwanted sexual advances, drug abuse or
consensual sex in the stacks. 

"It is one of the safest public institutions, in my
opinion, that you can find - but it is still a public
institution," said Judith F. Krug, the director of the
library association's Office for Intellectual Freedom.
"Sometimes bad people get in, and sometimes they do bad
things." When that happens, libraries have a range of
responses, from asking the disruptive person to leave to
calling the police. 

Ms. Krug, an opponent of the tap-on-the-shoulder method,
suggested that libraries set their browsers to return to
the home page after a period of inactivity to prevent the
viewing of an objectionable image that someone else has
left on the screen. 

Agnes Griffen, director of the Tucson-Pima Public Library
in Arizona, said that solutions - and public perceptions -
needed to take into account the libraries' resources and
the realities of the setting. 

Anti-pornography groups have tried to portray librarians as
"people who didn't care about little children," Ms. Griffen
said. But the truth, she said, is that librarians recognize
that they can do only so much to protect children. "We do
care about children," she said, but added that "the myth,
the pleasant stereotype of the children's room, which we
all love, isn't there any more." 

"We're not going to be able to sit behind the child and
watch what the child is looking at on the screen any more
than we can follow them around while they look at the
books," Ms. Griffen said. "I'm very sympathetic, but you
can't expect the public library to do that job for you.
We're here to help, but we can't be the monitor or the
censor or the nanny for children." 

The question often comes down to an issue of limited
resources, she said. "We can barely keep our libraries
open, much less hang over the back of a kid looking at a
PC," she said. 

Ms. Griffen suggested that the battle over Internet use in
libraries arose in part from a deeper anger over broader
changes in society. "Parents are upset because they don't
have enough time anymore to do the parenting they wish they
could do," she said. "They're unhappy about it and they
take it out on other people." 

Mr. Freedman of the Westchester County libraries said that
an anguished mother had confronted him about her children's
potential exposure to pornography in the library. There are
no filters on the library system's computer network, he
said, but one library, in Greenburgh, provides a filter on
a single machine in the children's section. 

" `If you have cable,' I said to her, `your kid will be
exposed to all kinds of things,' " he said. "The parent has
to take responsibility for what the kid does at home, at
other kids' homes, at the library or on the street." 

Ms. Krug of the library association said that in a world
full of risks, the library should be a place where young
people can seek out information - even information about
sex - safely. "They can learn about it in the library," she
said, "or behind the library." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/20/technology/circuits/20FILT.html?ex=1025588491&ei=1&en=212856f6c1d2221d

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