“We feel harassed and intimidated by having to work in a public environment where we might, at any moment, be exposed to degrading or pornographic pictures,” read a February 12 Minneapolis Star Tribune letter to the editor signed by 47 employees of the city’s Central Library.
Siding with a February 5 editorial by a patron outraged that MPL won’t intervene when users display sexually explicit Internet sites, the letter urges the installation in high-trafficked areas of “sophisticated filters” which, “contrary to the ‘official’ line of the ALA . . . allow searching of topics such as ‘breast cancer.’”
Although the library workers claim that complaints to library officials “have gone unheeded,” MPL spokesperson Kristi Gibson told American Libraries that Director Mary Lawson was “unaware of any specific instance” of a written complaint going unanswered.
A board statement sent to the Star Tribune February 18 reaffirms trustees’ distrust of filters as an “inadequate solution” and explains their preference for non-content-based approaches, such as deploying time-out software and making the Internet harder to access from highly visible, dedicated catalog terminals.
Posted February 21, 2000.