Lawyer nixes filters

[Donald Barclay]

Karen et al.,

I just came back from the Texas Library Association meeting in Fort Worth,
and while there I attended a program on Internet use policies in
libraries.  One of the librarians there (school? public?) said that the
lawyer who vets her library's policies told her not to rely on filtering
programs on the grounds that if a filtering program fails to weed out the
bad stuff, the library could be secondarily liable.  Her lawyer said that
relying on a use policy put them on safer legal ground.  This is, of
course, the opinion of one lawyer. Other lawyers will probably say just
the opposite. 

I thought Web4lib would be interested in this.  Anyone else out there had
any input from lawyers on this topic?

Donald A. Barclay
Coordinator of Electronic Services    always the beautiful answer
University of Houston Libraries       who asks a more beautiful question
DBarclay at uh.edu                               --e.e. cummings