The problem with this article appears at the end of the second paragraph: “They should find the fact that federal funding will be jeopardized by their libraries unwillingness to cooperate with federal guidelines for the Children’s Internet Protection Act [2000] in filtering obscenity out of both adult and children’s terminals.”
The assumption that CIPA specifies that only obscenity (which is clearly defined by law and illegal to begin with) be filtered and that filters only remove obscenity is patently wrong. Both CIPA and filters remove material that is “harmful to minors” which has no definition within the law.
Michael Sauers is the Director of Logan Library in Logan, UT. Prior to this he was one of the founding staff and Technology Manager for Do Space in Omaha, NE. After earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany's School of Information Science and Policy Michael spent his first 20 years as a librarian training other librarians in technology along with time as a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, a technology consultant, and a bookseller. He has written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and has published 14 books ranging from library technology, blogging, Web design, and an index to a popular horror magazine. In his spare time, he blogs at TravelinLibrarian.info, runs The Collector's Guide to Dean Koontz website at CollectingKoontz.com, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
Unless otherwise stated, all opinions are my own and are not to be considered those of the City of Logan, UT.
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