City officials in Dallas said they will examine ways to restrict access to pornographic Web sites on public library computers in response to a newspaper study that found the viewing of inappropriate material to occur frequently.
According to a study by the Dallas Morning News of web pages accessed at J. Erik Johnson Central Library computer users accessed more than 5,2000 Web pages containing pornographic images in a 45 minute period. That number represents about 7.5 percent of the more than 69,000 Web pages accessed on the library’s public computers during the time period studied.
“It’s certainly concerning to me. It’s surely not appropriate in a public library, and it’s not a signal we want to send,” Mayor Tom Leppert said. “We want people to come to our libraries and use them for traditional reasons. Viewing this material – it’s clearly not what the computers in the library are there for.”
Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm, a former librarian said she’s “very concerned” about the amount of people viewing pornography on public computers. As for software filters, “We don’t think filtering is the answer because of the reasons the American Library Association has outlined,” she said.
The American Library Association believes that computer pornography filters are imprecise. The filters have been know to block legitimate medical and artistic information, such as Web pages about breast cancer and paintings with nudity.
“There is no technology that can filter out all objectionable material, and every filter filters out constitutionally protected material. Filtering is of great concern to us, as a result,” said Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the American Library Association’s Washington, D.C., office.
Libraries wanting to limit pornography should place their computers in clear view of the library staff or install privacy screens so that the computer user is the only one who can view what’s on the monitor, Sheketoff said.
“There are other effective ways libraries can go about protecting children from images parents may find objectionable than simply blocking material. Filters – they create a bigger free speech violation issue than is worth it,” said Tracey Hayes, director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas’ Access Project.
