Electronic Brown Wrappers

[Jennifer Reiswig]

I was opposed to the idea of filtering for a while, but after 
I started looking at the global history files on our public 
Internet PCs, I'm starting to change my mind.
(Thanks to this list for the hint on using about:global in Netscape.) 
Fully half the sites visited are totally recreational without question.  
Sports, entertainment, shopping, games and chat seem to be the most
popular. Porn is pretty well represented, but so far no evidence of
kiddie porn or anything really extreme.
About another 10% of the sites are PROBABLY recreational, but I'm
giving folks the benefit of the doubt. (travel agencies, online
bookstores,
etc.)  We're not using a proxy server, so I'm pretty confident that 
the history lists are representative, if not totally accurate.

For me, my interest in finding a good filtering program has nothing 
to do with censorship and everything to do with rationing a scarce 
resource - namely, time on the computers.  This is an academic 
biomedical library, and the reason we bought these computers was to
enable people to access our electronic journals and other Internet
resources, which we spend a lot of time, money, and energy finding
and organizing.  When people spend hours at the PCs on basketball 
betting pools, stereo shopping, and mail-order bride hunting (I kid you 
not), this means there's nowhere to access the "good" stuff.

Of course, people have always used the library's physical facility
to do recreational reading, write letters home, snooze, etc.  But 
we have seating for over 100 people, and public Internet access for 
only 4.

I think the collection development discussion is interesting, and I'm
looking forward to the day when we have such abundant Internet access
that I consider it part of the mainstream collection.

Jenny Reiswig
UCSD Biomedical Library
jreiswig at ucsd.edu