Censorship absolutism: A contrarian position

[Burt, David]

DSP Popeck wrote:

>The concern over monies has an extra facet that I omitted but you noted: no
>one wants to be the one to spend monies on "pornographic" material. Whether
>this sort of material belongs in a library can be debated, but I am
>confident that the magazines would be checked out. The same arguments used
>against carrying Hustler and other such material were once used
against carrying
>"R" rated movies. My local library only began carrying these titles when a

Like most people who argue against filtering, you duck what's really the
central issue here:  Appropriateness.  You guys act like appropriateness
isn't a cosideration in public library selection criteria (nice of you
to tell us what it is we do ;->).  That just flat-out isn't true.  You
dodge the fact that pornography in a public library is just grossly
inappropriate.

You further obscure things by confusing hard-core pornography with
R-rated Movies.  These are clearly different animals.  You can certainly
make a convincing case that "Blue Velvet"  belongs in a public library,
but you cannot that "Debbie Does Dallas" does.

>Open internet removes any monetary considerations that might exist for the
>addition of any titles, pornographic or nonpornographic. While there is a
>dearth of librarians who would purchase pornography for their collection,
>full access to the internet allows the patrons, not the librarians, to make
>the decision on what they want to see. Ideally, we would carry everything.

Wrong on two counts.

First, you assume that access to the Internet is unlimited and free.  It
isn't.  It costs money and the ability of patrons to use it is limited.
If some guy is looking at  sex pictures, somebody else can't do their
homework, find a recipe or sports statistic, etc. There's nothing wrong
with limiting use of the Internet to sources which are more in keeping
with a library's mission.  If say, a Biology library had only one
Internet workstation, and wanted to dedicate it to only use for surfing
Biology related sites, what's wrong with that?  You call it censorship,
I call responsible use of resources.

Second, no, ideally a public library would not "carry everything".
Again, this is the issue of appropriateness.  Pornography is just one
criterion.  Currency, authority, and popularity are others.  Again, an
Internet workstation in a library is *not* an unlimited resource.

>No, everyone will lose when caving to censorship. What idea is next to be
>banned?

Once again, here we have the old slippery slope.  But these same
selection criteria have been in place for years.  What makes you think
that the judgment of public librarians with regard to electronic
resources will suddenly become much worse that it is with print
resources?

           ***********************************************************
          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) 635-0392 
          Fax:           (503) 635-4171 
          E-mail:      dburt at ci.oswego.or.us