[WEB4LIB] Internet use, censorship & sexual harassment

[Dyckman, Lise M]

Bonnie:

Does your institution have a sexual harassment policy? If so, and
pornography (visual or textual) is being printed and intentionally left
for other people to view, this may fall under your harassment policies.
Even if you don't have a sexual harassment policy in place for student
behavior, I'm willing to be you've got one that covers the workplace
(and it sounded from your email like staff were getting upset by this
situation, too).

BUT - I'd hesitate to invoke these unless it seems like patrons are
*intending* other people to be unwillingly exposed to their choice of
material. The person who wrote:
>"I am offended by the male users that are viewing and printing
>pornographic material.  Please do something to stop this.  I do not
want my
>money being used for their sick idea of pleasure."  
is asking you to censor other patrons according to his/her idea of what
is suitable.

If the problem is that patrons using your internet access computers can
be easily overlooked, maybe a non-censoring solution would be to provide
privacy shields for those monitors and/or printers. 

If you're concerned that library resources (paper and budgets to pay for
that paper) are being wasted on printing non-relevant graphics, you
might consider taking away the printers and requiring patrons to
download to disk -- although, since you state that:
>There are no other computer labs.
then taking away the printers would leave patrons with nowhere to get
hard copy from "legitimate" resources without paying.

The patron you quoted as writing 
>" I do not want my money being used for their sick idea of pleasure."  
might, just *might* have a point - if the issue is that competition for
computer time is making it difficult to use the machines for
academic-related purposes. (Personally, I reject the claim that paying a
user fee allows one to personally decide what appropriate use may be.)
In that case, you could lump viewing recreational websites in the same
category as playing games, which you say is already restricted. The
concept of "recreational" is a slippery slope, admittedly, but I suspect
viewing sites like nakedgirls.com (to quote another recent post to this
list) is verifiably on the uphill of that slope.

Hope these ideas help! And perhaps we can take cheer (?) in the thought
that those of us in academic/health libraries have an easier time of it
when it comes to censorship and pornography than our colleagues in
public libraries.

Lise M. Dyckman
Health Sciences Library, Sequoia Hospital
email:  ldyckman at chw.edu           phone:  (650) 367-5880