Comment

Comment by Allen on September 24, 2012 at 5:08pm

We've found it best to let the attorneys sort it out and trust what they're telling us. We've been specifically told by them, no content filtering, federal law. This has been the policy at our main library, all of the branches and every other library in the state for quite some time now.

Comment by Rebekah on September 24, 2012 at 5:03pm

I'm not a First Amend. attorney. The ALA has links to all the legal stuff, if I wanted to go through it, but I'm sure Congress saw the issues and crafted the statute around them. That's what the Supreme Court decided, anyway. An additional wrinkle in the statute was the communities had to do notice-and-comment before instituting the filtering. I'm not sure of the constitutional implications of that. In general, Congress can't create carrots infringing First Amend. rights just by doing local notice-and-comment. The FCC links to a software company that helps institutions comply. The ALA provides tips on how public libraries can comply with minimal effort. They basically make unfiltered the default for computers not in children's areas by designating computers "adult use only" or making users certify their age when using them. I'm guessing adults could go to a CIPA-compliant library and not really notice. Kids would go to a special study area paid for with CIPA funds. The library wouldn't take a hit buying the filtering software (or kids' hardware) because the whole point is federal money for technology in libraries; even with the extra expense, it's a net gain for libraries.

Comment by Allen on September 24, 2012 at 4:46pm

@Billy

Rebekah beat me to it. We've had attorneys have beat this thing to death from both sides. CIPA doesn't apply in our case. I don't know the specifics because I'm not an attorney and haven't been personally involved with any of the debate there.

Comment by Rebekah on September 24, 2012 at 4:29pm

According to the FCC's website (and the American Library Association's, which challenged the law), that statute only applies to institutions in a particular program receiving federal money for certain technology uses. It was part of an education bill, so I'm guessing most of the money went to schools rather than libraries. Also, it merely requires a "policy" about uses of the internet that may be harmful to children. I've been involved in drafting "policies" to meet regulatory or insurance requirements. You draft a policy prohibiting the prohibited activity, and appoint a staffer to enforce it. Then you continue with the status quo. While the FCC's website does mention filtering, this is only for speech with minimal or no First Amend. protections: "pictures that are: (a) obscene; (b) child pornography; or (c) harmful to minors." Just as local governments can choose whether to fund libraries, the federal government can put conditions on federal funding of libraries. The law also requires that the library be able to remove the filters when an adult requests.

Comment by Rebekah on September 24, 2012 at 12:46pm

Thank you, Allen. The First Amend. issues are exactly my point. Nice to have the practical perspective. As for what wood pulp and e-books get purchased, I know for the two counties where I have privileges [Any California resident can get privileges at San Francisco's libraries.], most purchasing is by a service. Government employees make few acquisition decisions. I don't know about periodicals, and I don't know what factors the for-profit service considers. The libraries are somewhat responsive to patron requests, but I don't know what the budget is for one-offs. The libraries appear to coordinate very well with the schools to make the necessary books available for school projects, but otherwise what's on the shelves is descriptive, not normative. See my comment about Aristotle, to which you can add Gadamer, and likely Plato. If most members of my book group didn't have access to academic libraries, I might suggest a campaign to request more copies of our readings at the local libraries. We had to cancel the Gadamer meeting because not enough people could get copies. There was 1 copy for 3 counties. It's cyclic, too. If the library doesn't have the Rhetoric as a single volume, I'm less likely to bother looking for the Timaeus or Gadamer.

Comment by Allen on September 24, 2012 at 12:17pm

This happens to be what I do for a living. I manage the network, and pretty much everything else tech related, for the county public library here.

Our wages, the building and all of the basic services provided, come from county tax dollars. Anything above and beyond is provided by grants and donations. All of our publicly available computers came from a grant. We already have a ridiculously fast internet connection, which the library itself only uses a tiny fraction of, so it doesn't cost us anything more to make it available to the public. We have a room full of twenty-two computers that anyone can check out an hour at a time and get online or do whatever they need to do. It's always busy and people are always lined up, waiting their turn, all day long. They typically start lining up about twenty minutes before we open. So these machines get used a lot.

Regardless of where the money came from that pays for these things, we are a government organization. Federal law prohibits us from any kind of internet filtering at all, aside from security related things (filtering out virus/malware infected sites), under the first amendment. This includes porn. If you have a public library, funded by tax dollars, that is doing content filtering, they are in violation of federal law.

This is an ongoing sore spot with the community and with employees because it presents all kinds of issues, particularly when it involves kids being present. We put dividers and privacy screens on all of the monitors but if you're standing right behind the person doing the viewing, you can see everything. We put up signs and verbally warn people not to view adult content when there are children present but again, legally, there isn't anything we can do. You wouldn't think that people would sit there comfortably watching porn, so unabashedly, in such a public place but they do. There are a myriad of laws and rulings that come into play here, both supporting and condemning pornography in public places and they are all entirely situational. We have to be VERY careful about how we approach these situations.

Regarding playboy or other materials of the like, it's all a matter of demand and cost. Records are kept, and reviewed every month, that show how often which books and magazines get checked out, how many people are logging on to our public wireless signal, how often the internet PCs are getting used and any other services we offer. If a book or a service is getting little or no usage, we drop it to make room for something that will be get more use. I know that we carry a few photography and art magazines and books that contain quite a bit of nudity which, I'll be the first to jump up and say, is not the same thing as playboy, but we carry them because patrons asked us to and they continue to get checked out regularly.

The other thing to consider is what kind of abuse those materials receive. We carry maxim magazine and FHM and a few other men's magazines and they routinely get stolen, ripped, vandalized or otherwise destroyed. In a case like this, it's a waste of money to carry such material and some of these we no longer keep up to date just for this reason.

The decision to carry or not carry something will take those two things into consideration and has very little to do with what any political party or religion considers immoral or offensive.

Comment by Rebekah on September 24, 2012 at 11:12am

Billy, I'm pretty sure Playboy is available at some public libraries. Cosmo and Redbook are available at my local library. The difference is that the government can pick and choose among benefits it provides, but cannot restrict access to benefits arbitrarily. It can choose not to buy all sorts of resources for its public libraries - for [a real] example, buying multiple copies of the Twilight books, but only one copy of Aristotle's Rhetoric. Once it chooses to provide them, it cannot restrict how they're used. It especially can't spend money to restrict use. Again, internet filters are the government saying, "We'll give you access to almost all of mankind's knowledge, except a legal kind we don't like, and we'll spend money and time, which is money, making sure we don't give you what we don't like."

Comment by Rebekah on September 24, 2012 at 11:04am

Bob, any such conditions would be very hard to enforce. It's hard to make deals like that with the government, especially lasting longer than "lives in being plus 22 years." This post was in response to a longer discussion that didn't understand both the local budgeting and Constitutional law issues. As for the kids-and-porn bogeyman [I don't think it's as serious/dangerous, or even likely as others.], the solution at the public library is the same as at home: adult supervision, either by parents or library staff. In public, we can also put screens on the monitor so they can't be viewed from the side, so "kids" can't see what adults access.

Comment by Bob Giraldi on September 22, 2012 at 11:04am

Actually when Andrew Carnegie provided the money which created many of our public libraries it was with the provision that the taxpayers would take over and continue to support them financially.  I don't know if that's still binding or not, but the government might have some legal obligation to support them depending on the terms of those initial bequests.  That said, I'm not comfortable with libraries putting filters on their computers, but what do we do about kids being able to access porn or stumbling on it by mistake?  Not that the filters are 100% foolproof.

Comment by Rebekah on July 27, 2012 at 11:35am

I meant I couldn't explicate rational basis and strict scrutiny directly back to the First Amendment. Public libraries could filter porn, but not "hate speech," which is usually political or religious. It's a couple of first-figure syllogisms once you grant that singling out political and religious speech for any special treatment gets strict scrutiny, but what strict scrutiny is and how it relates to the First Amendment, I couldn't describe for lay people.

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