Protesters marched around the Harold Washington Library on Sunday, calling for the library system to install filters to prevent children from having access to Internet pornography.
The protesters’ solution is impractical and, to the extent it restricts library users’ access to constitutionally protected speech, legally questionable. So is a bill approved Wednesday by the Illinois Senate that would require public libraries to install filters on all computers accessible to children.
The concerns, though, are valid. It would be shortsighted for library officials to brush off public anxiety over what material minors can access at their facilities.
Rev. James Meeks, pastor of Salem Baptist Church, led 2,000 marchers who demanded a filtering system for Chicago Public Library computers. Meeks took to the streets after Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey told him that filtering software will not be installed.
Dempsey, in arguing that filters are ineffective and may infringe on adults’ rights to free access to information, was following the position advanced by the American Library Association.
Internet filters are not finely honed instruments. An official at the American Library Association said that the filters it has tested were invariably overinclusive or underinclusive in the material they blocked.
If a filter fails to block smut sites, it is useless. If it blocks legitimate sites, it prevents people from doing thorough research. When the Chicago Public Library tested filter software, it found about one-third of the Web sites blocked were legitimate–including sites for the Chicago Tribune and the Archdiocese of Chicago. The evidence suggests that most Internet filters offer parents little but a false sense of security.
In the old days, control of sensitive material was easy. If a library saw fit to subscribe to, say, Playboy, it could keep the magazine behind the librarian’s counter. It’s a different world with the vast array of information available via a computer with an Internet connection.
The Chicago Public Library system is not oblivious to that. Most branch libraries segregate children’s computers and have them programmed to open to a special Web page for children with specific links to other, appropriate Web sites, according to Dempsey. That doesn’t prevent enterprising kids from finding their way to inappropriate Web sites, but it steers them in the right direction. That is a start.
Librarians are not expected to be substitute parents, but they can take reasonable steps to head off trouble. If computer terminals are placed in open, high-traffic areas, kids and adults will be less likely to use them inappropriately for an age-old reason: they’ll get caught. There is no reason why the library staff can’t routinely patrol the computer area. The most effective deterrent may be a sharp tap on the shoulder. A public scolding by a librarian who spots a minor whose curiosity got the better of him can go a long way. That’s one area where humans will always trump computers.
