Electronic Brown Wrapper

[Burt, David]

Jennifer Heise wrote,

>As long as feminists, homosexuals, Wiccans, and others have to actively
>protest being censored by the filtering companies, filtering software is
>not a valid policy option.

It's true that most filters do block some of these things.  But here  a
key fact is left out.  The better filters break down banned sites by
subject.  Cyber Patrol, for example has about a dozen categories, such
as "Controversial", "Sex Education", and "Full Nudity".  When Cyber
Patrol is set-up so that only pornographic sites are blocked, it does a
good, though not perfect job of blocking out only pornography.  And the
better filters, like Cyber Patrol, allow you to un-block a site that has
been incorrectly blocked.  The selection of blocked sites is not
perfect, but it is rapidly improving.

>As long as materials that we would put in our collections is censored by
>filtering companies, without our input or control, filtering software is
>not a valid policy option.

Yes, this is true, but it's also nothing new to libraries either.
Librarians have relied on vendors to pre-select for them for years.
Buying books on an approval plan, or buying 300 full-text magazines on a
CD-ROM also involve letting a vendor do a certain amount of selection
for the librarian.  There's nothing wrong with that.  In fact, as the
bibliographic universe becomes ever larger, turning over portions of
selection duties to outside vendors is becoming a necessity.


  ***********************************************************
          David Burt, Information Technology Librarian 
          The Lake Oswego Public Library 
          706 Fourth Street, Lake Oswego, OR 97034
          URL:          http://www.ci.oswego.or.us/library/library.htm
          Phone:     (503) 675-2537 
          Fax:           (503) 635-4171 
          E-mail:      dburt at ci.oswego.or.us