censorship

[Nick Arnett]

At 01:53 PM 4/25/97 -0700, scharles wrote:
>It seems to me that the whole debate over filtering, selection, non
>selection, censorship and so forth could best be solved by providing
>libraries with software that allows them to create their own list of
>appropriate or inappropriate www sites.  Individual libraries could apply
>whatever standards they felt were in line with their mission statement.

I'm coming to believe that this kind of approach, with one significant
additional feature, is inevitable.  The added capability is that libraries
and other groups have to be able to share their points of view, expressed as
cataloging of Web resources.  Clearly, "cataloging the Internet" is a task
that is unimaginable without distributing the task to at least a large
proportion of the organizations and individuals that use the net.

Rather than dwelling on  this as a big ugly technical problem (which it is
but we're tackling and I'm sure others are), we'd do well to look at it as
an incredible creative opportunity (as well as an opportunity for a company
like mine to sell tools, of course!) that will result in a sharing of ideas
on a scale that is impossible with the present-day advertising-based media
control of publishing channels.

Not that this inherently solves the problem of providing access to harmful
materials, but at least it has a chance of clearly identifying what's what,
which is a start.  Uncataloged information would be inaccessible, just as it
presently is with regard to physical resources.

Once information is cataloged, a standard system of identifying minors and
giving their parents control of what categories they may or may not access
becomes practical.  The child's library card could be the key to access not
only in the physical building of the library, but also in the home and
school, one can imagine. The librarian's role with regard to any resource
then is to organize it well, not to make any decision about who should or
should not have access to it.  Of course, some parents might choose to allow
their kids unlimited access, others will let the Christian Coalition set the
guidelines, etc.  So librarians would be likely to collaborate among
themselves for cataloging, even more than they now do, and probably end up
competing with other catalogers, some of whom will strive for objectivity,
some of whom will probably be extremely subjective.

Nick Arnett

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Verity Inc. -- Connecting People with Information

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