First: this is the second of 2 11-hour days. I shall attempt to be both coherent and courteous. Please forgive me if I fail at either. Or both.

1. Public libraries are not school libraries. Public librarians, even children's librarians, are not legally allowed to fulfill the in loco parentis function that school authorities are charged with. In fact, I know a few people who would not want me directing their children's behavior, reading, or intellectual growth. They vary from the people who have heart failure over Harry Potter, and fantasy in general, to the ones who want the teenagers to be banished to some other portion of the planet, to the ones who are outraged to find [your favorite banned book title here -- I collect them just to be annoying] on the shelf, to the ones who decried the violence in the story of Esther, which I read aloud in a children's version around Purim. (I suggested to a Jewish friend that perhaps changing "kill all the Jews" to "give all the Jews lots of owwies" might be OK. He howled.) You name it, I can find a librarian who’s been reamed out because of it.

The job of the public library is to open doors for people, and to protect their privacy, not to nail the windows shut and take away the curtains. Children too, and some of them need it because they come from very unwholesome situations. The parents who want to be involved are certainly not barred, but welcomed also, even when they drive us nuts, because a difficult parent, as long as abuse is no issue, is better than no parent at all. Believe me. Libraries have latchkey kids hanging out in them all the time. I have my share of court-appointed juvenile “volunteers”, too. I hear from their probation officers more often than I hear from their parents.

2. I can’t speak for all the libraries in all 50 states, but the ones I know do have Internet use policies. We have a genuine interest in preventing the library from being used as a location for criminal activities, or as an accessory to them. Pennsylvania has a state obscenity statute that is cited in my library’s Internet use policy, which also contains a statement reminding people that all kinds of criminal activities on public library machines is strictly forbidden. We check histories too. But, you know, if people want to traffic in porn or plan robberies through their email accounts, we can’t get at that.

3. Filters. Ah, yes, the panacea. Like killing a mosquito with a bazooka. Sometimes you get the insect, but always a hole in the wall. To those who say filters will protect kids whose parents don't care, I want to ask who filters the real lives of these children. To those who say that filters are better than they were, I will give you two examples, both having occurred in the last two months:
--Leading filtering technology will screen “The Naked Chef”’s website. This is a filter used by many schools and libraries, a vocabulary-based one. Site-based ones are also fun, in that they consider their lists of banned sites (the maintenance of which is a Sisyphean task) to be professional secrets, so the person or organization using the filter doesn’t know what’s really being filtered.
--A young man doing what I thought was very original and worthwhile scholarship, especially considering he was in the 8th grade, came looking for help in his research on the effects of weapons technology on military and civilian behavior at the beginning of the 20th century. His focus was the Tommy gun, and its use in World War I and also by the Mob during Prohibition. With filtered access, we located numerous websites from worthwhile organizations which we were screened from, I assume because of violence. (The filter, knowing what was better for us than we knew ourselves, gave us no indication why.) He had no Internet access at home, so he took the two he could get into and that was that.

Anyone who says that filters will free up a parent to wander around while his kid cruises the Internet unguided underestimates his kid’s ingenuity, the ingenuity of predators who know all about filters and will mostly stalk through email and chat rooms anyway, and overestimates the efficacy of filtering technology. NOW HEAR THIS: Filters are like baby gates. They give you that extra 25 seconds before the toddler actually climbs over and wanders out into the yard. That’s about all they’re good for. An absent parent who depends on a filter is an absent parent. The only effective filter is a present adult who gives a good goddamn.
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Before we moved to our new facility, we had no filters. That was because we had a whopping 2 public access terminals (a situation faced by many small-town and rural libraries), and in order to protect our adult patrons’ First Amendment right to view a medical illustration, we needed to have it that way. Children used those terminals, and the Earth did not spin backwards. That’s because we required an adult’s actual kiester to be in the chair next to anyone under the age of 12, and we required a parent to show up in person and sign off on a 4-page Internet policy along with the child for any child between the ages of 12 and 18. This policy was strictly enforced, so strictly that my youngest complained bitterly when she was not allowed on the Internet at the library even though her mom worked there. (I couldn’t sit with her; I was working.)

Now we have a dozen public access terminals with filters, 3 in the children’s library, and another 10 with no filters in a networked classroom that is kept locked except for tech classes, tours, supervised library activities for youth, and adults who request unfiltered access. It works very well.

If the law requires us to filter any computer that has any child on it at any time ever, this very satisfactory arrangement will become illegal. Our flexibility and professional discretion will be gone, and so, incidentally, will be access to countless things that didn’t need to be filtered in the first place. And the cyberslime will keep on oozing anyway, because that’s who they are and what they do.

For those who suggest that it’s a simple thing to turn a filter on and off, that’s true -- if you have one user and one computer to deal with. Those folks must have mistaken me for someone with extra time and lots of help.

Just incidentally: one of the groups that used the unfiltered classroom recently was a Cadette Girl Scout troop under the supervision of their two leaders and myself. When I broached the issue of parental consent for Internet use, one of the leaders became quite shirty with me for standing in the way of the girls’ access to information for their badges. I got around the issue by billing the activity as a tour and helping to supervise. The leader’s remark might interest you: “I’ll never get some of these people in here to sign a policy!” I finessed the policy because I know “some of these people”, and I know that it’s true. Indifference and lack of involvement are the dangers, and no filter can come close to fixing that.

Regards--
Mary Anne