Censorship absolutism: A contrarian position

[Burt, David]

Jennifer Heise wrote:

>Because most current censoring software is only appropriate for use in a
>fundamentalist church (censoring everything from nudity to NOW), it is
>inappropriate as the mainstay of library collections.

I can't really address this, because I don't know what version of which
filter you're talking about.  There is a lot of variation in filters.
For example, CyberPatrol with it's most restrictive settings on, is far,
far too restrictive.  But if you turn off the keyword blocking and only
turn on "Full Nudity" and "Sexual Acts", it does a pretty good, thought
hardly perfect job of blocking out only porn.

>It is fundamentally foreign to our ideal of a balanced collection. It is as
if we >purchased a set of Bible Baptist tracts and used them to replace
our Religion, >Philosophy, andHygeine sections!

I'd be very interested in seeing a filter which does this!

>If we use such obviously unbalanced software because the public is TELLING
>us what we can and can't collect, because the public is dictating to us what
>we can provide access to, how long is it before we must have written
>permission from a parent to let a seventeen-year-old read a book of stories
about >gay teenagers, or a book on birth control? (Or, for that matter,
to let that
>seventeen year old read a book on fundamentalist Chrisianity?) Once we let
>these lazy parents tell us that WE are responsible for what their children
>read, we open ourselves up for even MORE harassment than we already get
>from moral absolutists.

But we *do* let the public tell us what to collect, to a point.  It's
their money, not yours.  To a certain degree, we are responsible for
what children read in libraries.  We are responsible enough to not
select pornography.

          ***********************************************************
          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