children accessing porn; adults turning off filterware

[Burt, David]

 Mark Wilden wrote:

>Because Hustler costs money, which could be spent on more useful
material. >Libraries can't acquire every publication. They _can_
"acquire" the entire World >Wide Web. In fact, it costs money _not_ to.

As I pointed out earlier, the argument that access to each additional
website "does not cost money" is falacious.

>>  A connection to the Internet does not mean the library has "acquired
the Internet"
>Why not? In what sense pertinent to this discussion (accessibility) do
libraries not >"have" every page on the Web the instant they install the
right hardware and >software?

One nice thing about the circuitousness of these arguements is that I
can just cut-n-paste old posts to answer the same questions.  I've
discovered that a big part of being an activist is saying the same
things, over and over again.

A web site is fluid, was not individually selected by librarians, and
does not exist within the library.  For these reasons, a remote web site
is not entitled to the same level of protection, and does not deserve to
be defended with the same vigor as a selected book on the shelf.

Books are static resources, as their content over years remains
unchanged.  Web sites are fluid, their content changing continuously.  A
web site judged appropriate by a librarian in 1996 may no longer be so
in 1997.  Librarians need to have the flexibility to add and delete web
sites as their content changes.  Librarians have never felt obligated to
maintain ever-changing resources in perpetuity.  The best analog of this
is the periodical subscription.  When the scope or content of a
periodical changes to the point where it is no longer appropriate for
the library, it is not censorship for the library to cancel its
subscription.  The same must be true of web sites.

For years, libraries have accessed remote materials, via on-line
services and via broadcasts.  But librarians have never felt that these
remote materials had to be defended with the same vigor as materials in
the library.  When a library shows a broadcast of "Sesame Street", it
has not "selected" television, and is not obligated to provide unlimited
television viewing to its patrons.

This is not to say that remote web sites accessed by the library are not
entitled to any protection at all.  Under the right circumstances, a
remote web site could be entitled to basically the same protection as an
existing library resource.  For example, if a library carried a
subscription to Playboy and then decided that the Playboy web site also
met the same selection criteria, and the library provided a link to the
Playboy web site from its home page, the library could rightfully defend
its link to the Playboy web site with the same vigor as it defended its
subscription to Playboy magazine.

Librarians have traditionally viewed materials that were included in
their collections inadvertently as not being entitled to the same level
of protection as materials that were individually selected.  In 1990,
the Multnomah County (OR) Public Library removed "Caroline" and "Mariska
II", two anonymous books that contained graphic descriptions of sexual
acts, because they were not ordered by title but acquired in a large
shipment of paperbacks.  Web sites that have not been individually
selected are not entitled to the highest level of protection we reserve
for deliberately selected materials.

Providing access to the Internet means providing the potentiality of
access to materials which do not exist in the library.  This is clearly
not the same as selecting and acquiring materials.  This is more closely
analogous to providing inter library loan or television broadcasts. When
I attended the University of Washington, the Undergraduate Library had
several television sets for viewing news and educational programming.
All channels except CNN and PBS were blocked.   Filtering means
restricting the potentiality of access to materials that do not exist
within the library.  That is no more censorship than is the
non-selection of materials.  Restricting the potentiality of access to
materials that do not exist in the library simply cannot be shoehorned
into being analogous with the removal of existing materials.