Chat Rooms (Policy)

[Filtering Facts]

Shirl Kennedy wrote:
> Unless you resort
>to some draconian software filtering solution, you're still gonna wind up
>doing the Internet police thing.   Who cares?
>
>If someone wants to spend his or her
>30 minutes researching investments, gathering medical or legal information,
>looking at the Dilbert Zone, reading a foreign newspaper, playing online
>chess, answering e-mail at a Web-based service...or "wasting time" in a chat
>room...well, okay.  

I don't think limiting chat is really like filtering.  With filtering,
you're making the decision that a whole class of content is inappropriate
for a library.  With the banning of chat, I don't think the decision is
really content based, I think it's more about allocation of resources.

Whether or not library Internet terminals should be used for both
communication and viewing, or strictly for viewing is an interesting
question that I don't think there really is a clear "right answer" to.

I will say though that there seem to be a lot more legitimate uses for
e-mail than there are for chat. I have yet to see a chat session that wasn't
idle chatter.

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David Burt, Filtering Facts, HTTP://WWW.FILTERINGFACTS.ORG
David_Burt at filteringfacts.org