Faced with standing-room-only crowds seeking ways to shield children from inadvertent views of pornography on the Internet, officials at the Des Plaines Public Library are reconsidering their policy of no filters on adult computers.
“I had to sit down with my daughter and tell her I don’t want her to go to the library anymore because there are bad people there who are doing bad things,” library patron Wanda Glitz said at a recent meeting.
The Internet debate is the latest twist on a question as old as libraries themselves: How much should librarians control what patrons view? Organizations such as the Chicago-based American Library Association and the American Civil Liberties Union oppose filtering Internet content in libraries, saying it runs afoul of patrons’ 1st Amendment rights.
“Because material may be offensive to someone else doesn’t mean that the adult doesn’t have a right to access it,” said Judith Krug, executive director of the library association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom.
Des Plaines has Internet content-filtering software on the 10 computers with Internet access in the second-floor children’s area, but the 28 Internet computers on the fourth floor are unfiltered, and the library does not prohibit patrons from viewing sexually explicit material.
If a patron catches a neighboring patron viewing objectionable material, the library’s policy is to ask if the complaining patron would like to be moved to another terminal, library Director Sandra Worlin said.
A committee in Des Plaines has recommended a filter system that would block images while allowing text to be read from adult sites. The Library Board takes up the question Tuesday.
Other libraries take various approaches.
Tamiye Meehan, director of the Indian Trails Public Library in Wheeling, said the Library Board does not filter any of its Internet computers. Neither does the Chicago Public Library, although the library plans to filter the 400 computers on children’s floors in its 79 branches within a year, spokeswoman Maggie Killackey said.
(An erroneous statement as published has been deleted from this text.)
Other libraries–such as the one in Rolling Meadows and the Schaumburg Township District Library, which serves six communities and is one of the largest library districts in the state–filter all their Internet computers.
Schaumburg Library Director Mike Madden said he hopes to avoid any legal ramifications that might come with allowing people to surf for pornography.
Librarians in some districts have complained that their exposure to Internet pornography constitutes sexual harassment. In the most famous of these cases, the Minneapolis Public Library paid $435,000 to 12 librarians to settle a sexual harassment suit in which the librarians claimed patrons constantly viewed sexually explicit images on computers and ignored their attempts to discourage them.
In other cases, library patrons have complained that pornography surfers have gone beyond watching.
In Naperville, police arrested a man in June for allegedly fondling himself while viewing a pornographic Web site. Richard Blaszak, 34, was charged with two misdemeanor counts each of sexual exploitation of a child and public indecency. Teenage boys in the computer lab at the time reported Blaszak.
In Des Plaines, police arrested Ben Miller, 18, of Skokie in June on one misdemeanor count of public indecency after a patron alleged that Miller fondled himself while viewing a pornographic site. Both cases are pending.
Meehan said the Internet did not create such problems.
“I’ve been a librarian for 30 years now,” Meehan said. “And from day one, I’ve been chasing men out of the stacks. It’s a problem you run into at a place where the doors are open to everyone.”
In 2001 Congress passed the Child Internet Protection Act, which requires public libraries to install filters on all computers if they want federal money from such programs as E-rate. Since 1996 E-rate has provided schools and libraries with $12.4 billion to install telephone and Internet technology.
The ACLU challenged the law on behalf of the Multnomah County Library in Oregon and others who disagreed with the requirement. But last year the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that libraries must filter their Internet content if they want to receive federal money.
But if an adult wants to view unfiltered material, the court ruled, libraries must be able to remove any filters quickly.
Leaders on all sides agree that most filtering systems available to libraries today are problematic.
Some don’t adequately filter out pornographic sites–such as those written in foreign languages–and often filter out sites used for legitimate research and enrichment, such as sites about breast cancer, sexually transmitted diseases and contraception methods.
Ultimately, the Illinois library association and other national agencies say it is up to Des Plaines’ Library Board and residents to decide what is best for their community.
“It’s good that we’re examining our values and expressing what’s important to us to find a way that works,” Worlin said. “As a library we support that. That’s exactly what we’re all about.”
