Minneapolis Board Reluctantly Adopts Filters

Fang-Face writes “The title says less than half of it.
The library director says flat out that filtering under CIPA is extortion. The filters will also be reviewed in a year to see if the $150,000 or so being used for the extortion is worth the grief of putting up with patron complaints. Considering that they are caving in to this extortion in the face of state budget cuts, I’m not going to waste my time feeling optimistic.”

June 9, 2004 by rochelle Uncategorized 5

kctipton says:

June 9, 2004 at 4:56 pm

Extortion? You mean, “With Strings Attached”?
If some rich sugar daddy came along with $150,000 and made the same demands would this director feel the same way? It’s because the government attaches the strings that this guy gets so mad. Minneapolis can be persuaded to raise that much money for its libraries, can’t it? It’s home of mpr.org after all.

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rochelle says:

June 9, 2004 at 7:25 pm

Re:Extortion? You mean, “With Strings Attached”?
If a patron came waving a big chunk of money, with strings attached to something that was counter to the library’s mission or code of ethics, I imagine they’d say “no thank you.” I think most of us have had calls or contacts from patrons or “benefactors” who told us, “I’ll buy these books of my choosing for you if you promise to put them in a special collection and never get rid of them.”

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Anonymous Patron says:

June 9, 2004 at 7:40 pm

Hostile Workplace
http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=10 63212018621

“On Aug. 15, the Minneapolis Public Library announced that it had agreed to pay $435,000 to 12 employees-lead plaintiff Wendy Adamson, five other librarians, five aides and a page-who accused the library administration of subjecting them to a hostile work environment by leaving them exposed to pornography.”

Does anyone know if the librarians who sued were fired or forced to retire or had their jobs eliminated?

Bravo to the librarians in this landmark case.

Their action established the legal presidence
we can all use to keep our libraries from becoming
purveyors of porn.

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Eli says:

June 9, 2004 at 8:04 pm

Reluctant Acceptance
Compliance with the law is hardly succumbing to extortion. If the need for state funds to continue operations is important and compliance with the law is required what is the problem here?
It looks like that old devil political agenda is flying in the face of practicality. Since when do people have the right to evaluate laws for practical reasons. The law is the law. If one has problems with it then raise objections through proper channels. Don’t bring it to the streets. It seems to me that if the library budget was healthy then the library administration would be defiant of the law. As Mr. Rogers would say, can you say political agenda? I think the philosophical point behind this reluctant acceptance is very unhealthy and gives a bad message to the public about libraries and librarians. It only reinforces the idea that libraries are not giving information they are promoting political ideas.

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Lis says:

June 10, 2004 at 12:44 am

Re:Reluctant Acceptance
If the library director refused to use filters and declined the state funds, that wouldn’t be being “defiant of the law.” It’s perfectly legal to refuse to filter if the library doesn’t take the funds contingent on using filters.

It would only be a violation of the law if the library took funds claiming they would install filters, and then didn’t do so. Many libraries are refusing funds contingent on using filters on the bottom-line calculation that the funds on offer were less than the cost of buying, installing, and using the filters, or not enough more than those costs to compensate for the many practical problems caused by blunt-instrument, black-box filters available.

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