I’m intentionally going to keep this brief because I don’t want to name names for professional reasons and I don’t want this tol become a multipage work of nothing but vitriol that defeats the purpose of the message.
I work in a research library. We have 93 public access computers on our first floors. Like MOST- in fact, like ALMOST ALL research libraries, we do not have filtering software on our public access computers. The reasons are simple:
1- Filtering software is not reliable. Dependent upon how it works it can block anything from articles on breast cancer to articles about the rim of the sun to pages that quote, in a completely scholastic nature, sexually explicit materials (including the Starr report)
2- The 10,000s of students/professors/patrons who have access to our library can, it is reasonable to expect, have a legitimate need for any type of site. Hate-sites/skinheads, drug legalization, effects of pornography and the blogosphere are just a few of the topics that are almost standard “plain black dress” assignments researched by our patrons.
3- Like most research libraries, we subscribe to the various guidelines about unrestricted access to information. We are NOT a public library, no child under 16 is allowed to use our computers unattended, and we expect a reasonable amount of self-control by our patrons.
4- With every filtering software conceivable there are ways to get around it and look at porn. (Backwards google alone is sufficient to thwart some filters.)
Now, that said, we do have patrons who look at porn. It is true. It is not for scholarly purposes. They are usually teenaged male college students.
If we receive a complaint about a patron watching pornography we will ask the patron to stop. Usually they vacate before we ever get to them because they usually know that somebody is going to complain about them. On the very few occasions we have had people masturbating or making lewd comments, we called security within a heartbeat of the complaint and had the person removed and, if necessary, banned from the library.
However, a zealous student paper has taken it upon itself to make a crusade against the evil library and its love of pornography. A staff writer wrote an article entitled, in the print version, LIBRARIES OKAY WITH PORN, though it was retitled in the online edition. He included a picture of a pornographic website supposedly found in the recent memory cache of one of the public computers (the memories of our computers are flushed several times per day, incidentally) with the librarian and library employees and several students in the background.
By several reliable accounts, the photo could not have been more staged and the student has in fact used the exact same photographic image in other projects! In other words, he himself pulled up a pornographic image and took a photo of it in such a way as to incriminate the library as much as possible. (Incidentally, the student to the left of the computer in the photo is a deeply religious foreign born student who hopes to one day be president of his country and has never once looked at porn in the library to my knowledge- how the hell hard would it have been to have cropped him out of the picture before publishing it? As much of a photo software novice as I am I could have done that in 4 seconds.
The student misquoted, not in word but in context, the people in the library he spoke with about the porn policy. The online version of the article has been edited upon complaints about this and is currently fairly more balanced, but the incendiary headline and comments in the print version had already done their damage and there has been no retraction.
Among other complaints, the “librarian” that the student originally quoted in his interview with the dean and in print was in fact a student worker. Even then, I know the student worker well- he’s a superintelligent fellow (who you’d know from looking at him is a student rather than a faculty member) and his words were taken completely out of context. The “librarian” he spoke with was on duty around 11 pm when the professional staff members were gone, but to these nimrods anybody who works in the library from the lady cleaning mildew off the tiles to the dean is a librarian.
So it’s caused a shit-storm. We’re having umpteen comments and questions each day about “why do you ENCOURAGE people to watch porn?” and the like. The Fundie students (of whom there are many, including the newspapers troglodyte new editor [a kid who supports Roy Moore and seems to have no concept in his editorials that he’s not at Bob Jones University and that not all Alabamians are Christian and that not all Christians interpret the Bible the same]) are particularly up in arms and, according to reliable sources, are planning a test case. They plan to bring a 17 year old into the library, have him/her “exposed to” porn, and then sue the library/university. It’s a serious enough threat that a lawyer has been contacted by the university.
So, I hardly the words to pit this incident and must be wary about what I say in general. He made it sound (in print, as I said- the online version is much more tame) that the library just loves it some porn- COME ONE! COME ALL! YOU’LL COME FOR THE INTERRACIAL BISEXUAL THREE WAY STREAMING VIDEOS BUT YOU’LL STAY FOR THE PEER REVIEWED SUBSCRIPTION DATABASE PSYCHOLOGY JOURNALS!") and I’m almost as pissed at the university. They are willfully taking a “let’s give this time and let it blow over” which I personally think is among the worst things they can do. My suggestions would be to
1- have an internal forum to address the issue and prepare exact statements and review policies
2- have an open forum to which all are invited held in one of the university auditoriums and discuss the issues of First Amendment/Information Freedom/Research Libraries, etc…, preferably with guest speakers and use this as a chance to educate the chirren on WHY we don’t filter (and the 'it-would-seem-to-me-unnecessary-to-explain point that one librarian and at most 2 student workers cannot reasonably be expected to monitor what is and what is not being viewed on 93 computers spread throughought the large ground floor.
Good gawd but I hate people sometimes, be they officious pencil pushers with no understanding of human nature or college students in search of a cause and no great desire to understand it. I am curious to hear what others think about this issue though. Thoughts? Tithes? Offerings?
