At the beginning of November I sent out a request for information from
members of this list about what measures they take to control usage of
the Intenet in terms of filtering and time restrictions. I undertook
to summarise the results, so here they are:
I am grateful to Lionel Aldridge at Leeds for sending me the results
of a similar, but wider reaching survey he had carried out earlier.
This showed that most authorities seem to rely on Acceptable Use
Policies and having PCs visible to staff, but a couple have, or will
have filtering software (in one case only for children).
West Lothian use the American I-GEAR filtering package on a
council-wide licence. They sent me a document from an American user
who found it very useful in controlling what seems to be a high level
of abuse in their particular library, but it is not without problems
of its own.
It seems fair to say that the profession is not in favour of
filtering, and would prefer to find other ways of ensuring material
that will cause general offense is not displayed on library screens.
However, having just had our Intenet access policy approved by
committee in preparation for us offering a service next year, it was
very clear that local politicians and other interested parties are
very concerned about pornography in particular. We found that in order
to carry them with us, we had to say that although we would be
providing "signposts" to sites we recommend, and that we would be
siting terminals in full view, and that we would not at this stage
site them in unsupervised children's libraries, we would also attempt
to filter out sites that are known to be unsuitable.
The EARL AGM last month had a most interesting paper presented by Bob
Usherwood, and it is clear that filtering is indesirable and far from
the complete answer to the age-old problems that the Internet has
revived. However, at this stage of development, in this authority at
least, practical considerations mean that we have had to accept the
principle of a level of filtering that we intend to keep as low key as
possible but still satisfying the local community's legitimate
concerns.
As to restricting time automatically, a number of people expressed an
interest, but none who replied are using any software. I am aware of
some American software promoted by Ameritech, but it would seem it is
not in use in this country.
Many thanks to all who responded to my request.
Duncan Westlake (London Borough of Hillingdon).
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