Censorship Needs: Real or Perceived?

[Walter Minkel]

I'm usually a lurker, but I feel I need to say something about whether the
need to filter is based on something real:

98% of what we see our patrons looking at on the Web is innocuous, fun
stuff (we're a suburban branch library), or stuff for research, homework,
job hunting, etc. It's that other 2% or so that's problematic. There are
groups of teenage boys (and individual older men) who come in and look at
the porn sites. The problem doesn't seem to come so much from other people
seeing the sites while they're up, but of parents who, looking for sites
for themselves & their kids, pull down the "go" menu & see porn sites that
the person before them has viewed in the list. Several times, these
parents have come over to me & asked, "You let people look at these things
in a _public library_?" If and when these incidents are recounted in a
PTA, in a meeting of soccer parents, or in a church group, such incidents
can lead to problems. I'm not for filtering, but other than going to each
machine & clearing the cache each time someone stops using the PC (which
we don't have the time/staff to do). Solutions? --W

Walter Minkel, Youth Librarian
Gresham Regional Library, 385 NW Miller Ave., Gresham, OR 97030
Voice (503)248-5164; fax (503)248-5198; walterm at nethost.multnomah.lib.or.us
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Vision is the art of seeing things invisible. --Jonathan Swift