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Posted May 13, 2005.

Oklahoma Library to Allow E-Mail, Gaming After All

The board of the Public Library of Enid and Garfield County, Oklahoma, reversed itself May 9 and decided that e-mail and online gaming would continue to be allowed on public internet workstations after all. However, trustees stood by their February decision to ban patrons’ use of chat rooms. The library will also continue to maintain a year’s worth of log-in records at the recommendation of local police, pending an opinion by the state attorney general as to whether such records are confidential and therefore available to law enforcement only by court order.

Before the vote, several patrons testified about how important library access to e-mail services was to them. “If you allow these restrictions, you might as well remove ’public’ from the name of the library,” Charlene Johnson told trustees. Enid city attorney Carol Lahman said that barring only chat-room access would strike a balance between minimizing patron inconvenience and cooperation with law enforcement. Police Chief Rick West asserted that his department was more concerned with protecting minors than in inadvertently causing information to be censored, the May 10 Enid News and Eagle reported.

“This library has sided with the molesters against the children,” reacted an anonymous reader of the online Enid News. The posted comment concluded with a link to Plan2Succeed.org, an antipornography website whose unidentified developer describes its mission as “stopping the American Library Association from endangering children.”

Posted May 13, 2005.