LISNews: Librarian News

San Jose City Councilman Pete Constant accused the city's head librarian Wednesday of foot-dragging and shoddy research on his proposal to filter pornography out of library computers. Constant told Library Director Jane Light he was "disappointed" in her progress report to a council committee on his October proposal for the city to reconsider Internet filtering on library computers. A final report is due in March.
"I don't honestly feel we're going down a path to finding solutions," Constant said. "I feel we're going down a path to finding reasons not to do this."

People hate librarians enough to take it all the way to the Supreme Court.

In the U.S. vs. the ALA, the attorney for the respondents, Paul M. Smith makes a case that library patrons can't be required to suffer the stigma of asking a librarian to unblock a "porn" filter. Essentially, that asking a librarian for this help is so traumatic that it should be declared unconstitutional. So that ultimately, the entire filtering issue comes down to the "stigma" of asking the librarian for help.

And this is the basis for this case, people hate us so much that they can't bear to ask us for help even if that help allows them to watch videos of people screwing.

...

After I bloggered about this today, I thought about my conclusion and realized something else.... this "stigma" argument was presented by the counsel representing the ALA(!!!???).
What is it supposed to mean when the association formed to represent your interests in public and political arenas, admits in public documents that it's an undue burden for someone to ask for your help? (Yeah, I realize this isn't funny.)

In news that surprises no one reading this site, Gwinnett County Public Library patrons discovered that the library's public internet filtering doesn't always work.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has the full story, but what got me was this line:

"At a public library in Norcross last week, it took less than 15 seconds to find pornographic photographs on a computer terminal."

Really? 15 seconds? That seems to be a long time to launch a browser, bring up Google Image Search, and search for "boobs."

The San Jose Mercury News Says Filtering was a bad idea a decade ago, and still is. Responding to a minor nuisance at the downtown library by dampening the rights of inquiry and speech of all patrons at every city library is an unacceptable trade-off.