Most of my long-time readers will be familiar with my opinion of filters. Well, for the past two days I’ve been teaching workshops in a computer lab for a local school district. Being a school lab, I was subject to the district’s filtering system. Luckily, I was given the password to get around it, which worked most of the time, but the level of filtering astounded me. I was teaching blogging and RSS and Blogger was blocked. So was Flickr. (This made showing my blog interesting as the text would appear but the images, hosted on Flickr, would not be loaded.) Even my e-mail was blocked since lishost.org was considered a blockable “forum” which not even my use of the secret password would let me get through the filter. whatsmyipaddress.com was blocked, yet whatismyipaddress.com was not. (Go figure.) As one librarian said at lunch today, “let’s teach highway safety buy closing the highways”.
Published by Michael Sauers
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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