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Rochester Central Library Accepts Web RestrictionsOne month after the Monroe County (N.Y.) Library System agreed to block all pornographic sites on its public computers, trustees of the Rochester Public Library—which serves as the MCLS headquarters library—voted in late June to adopt the same policy, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported July 4. The city’s library board had previously disagreed over the policy, recommended by an eight-person task force in response to Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks’s threat to pull $6.6 million in operating funds if RPL did not block all access to adult websites. According to the board’s statement on the Rochester city website, “This was a difficult decision, which was arrived at following careful review of the first amendment, state law, and censorship concerns. The Board concluded that the Central Library is too valuable to the community to allow any disruption of service.” The new policy, scheduled now to go into effect in mid-July, states that websites “identified by the library’s filtering product as pornographic will be blocked on all Rochester Public Library computers; users 17 and older may request in writing that a blocked site be reviewed if they believe a site has been blocked in error.” The library or a designee will then “review the site and make a judgment based on the library’s collection development policy” whether to unblock the site for the patron who made the request. The earlier policy, which was placed on hold after Brooks’s action in February, allowed adult patrons to make a verbal request to unblock a filtered site. “This is a great victory for our community,” Brooks said in the Democrat and Chronicle. “Taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize pornography in our public libraries.” Posted July 6, 2007. |
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