Monroe County Board Maintains Porn Ban, Will Make Disabling Filter More Onerous

-- Library Journal, 05/24/2007

In response to a threat from Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks to deny $6.6 million to the Rochester Public Library Central Library, NY--which is funded by the county and serves both systems--if Internet pornography were not banned, the Monroe County Library System board yesterday agreed to make its policy more restrictive. Previously, the filter would be disabled on request by adults, no questions asked, as per the American Library Association’s interpretation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) decision.

Now, the library would block sites identified by the library’s filtering vendor as pornographic until a designated library staffer, upon written request, determines, "after reviewing the site against the criteria contained in the Library Collection Development Policy that the site should be unblocked." The recommendation for change came from the Joint Monroe County Library System and Rochester Public Library Internet Task Force. (Summary and appendices.) The library already had stopped disabling the filter after Brooks sent her Feb. 21, 2007 letter, prompted by a television news report about "porn in the library."

While the policy states that the unblocking determination "should be made without undue delay," library spokeswoman Patricia Uttaro told LJ that "we haven’t talked yet about the procedural implementation." The policy would cover all libraries in the county, some of which also have been disabling the filter on request. The task force pointed out that, while filtering software has improved, all systems overblock and underblock. Because the filter used by the library, from the company 8e6, filters web sites, not web pages, it blocks, for example, articles and reviews from Playboy’s web site that are not sexual content.

The task force, formed after Brooks issued her threat, acknowledged that the recommended policy "represents a departure from prior considered opinion regarding the obligation of a public library to remove filtering ‘without undue delay' [for] sites of constitutionally protected (not illegal) material blocked by filtering solutions and might subject the implementing entity to a suit from a group such as the ACLU." Such a suit is pending in Eastern Washington. The task force report also acknowledges that any protocol that requires library staff (other than the director and assistant director) to view sites deemed "pornographic" while considering unblocking requests could subject the library to a "hostile environment" discrimination complaint.

While the Rochester Public Library Board has no oversight over city and county library Internet access, board President John Lovenheim yesterday called the proposed policy the library would adopt "censorship pure and simple," according to the Democrat and Chronicle. Lovenheim suggested that the recommended policy be approved only through September 30, 2007, Uttaro told LJ, and challenged his board to recommend that the Monroe County Legislature pass a law that prohibits viewing pornography in public places, thus taking the onus off the library. The Rochester board will meet again next week.