WASHINGTON – John Taube believes education and parental involvement are the best ways to prevent children from seeing obscene material on the Internet.
But Taube, the director of Allegany County’s public libraries, is not taking any chances: His county has installed filters on all 45 of its public computers.
“We are merely filtering for pornography,” Taube said. “With the library as a public space, people don’t have a right to view that.”
Across Maryland, counties differ greatly in their Internet filtering practices. Some, like Allegany, choose to filter all of their computers, while others selectively filter or do not filter at all.
State law only requires that libraries have some plan to prevent minors from viewing obscene materials on the Internet, but filtering is not the only way to meet the law. A separate federal law being reviewed by the courts, the Children’s Internet Protection Act, would apply only to counties that receive federal technology money.
Montgomery County has filters on its machines for children, but kids are not required to use them, and are welcome to use the unfiltered computers in the adult sections of the libraries. County library Director Harriet Henderson said the county has 350 public computers, 45 of which are deemed for children’s use and have filters on them.
One of the reasons Montgomery County decided to have optional filtering is because library officials do not think current filtering technology is reliable. Henderson said she remembers testing one early filter that blocked access to a site about NASA’s Mars Explorer — because the combination of the two words produced the word “sex.”
In Carroll County, filters are installed on all of the county’s 80 public computers, said library spokeswoman Ann Wisner, but each library has the ability to turn the filters off. Wisner said the decision to filter was made by the library’s board of directors.
“There are many different levels of filtering and we filter for pornography,” Wisner said. “I have not heard of problems either in terms of underblocking or overblocking.”
Anne Arundel County does not filter its computers, but keeps them in open areas where staff “actively monitor” use by children. For adults who want to view “adult-oriented” material, the county provides privacy screens.
“With the children, we are on the lookout,” said Andrea Lewis, an Anne Arundel library spokeswoman.
Avis Matthews, a spokeswoman for the Prince George’s County library system, said patrons at the county’s 18 branches monitor each other’s Internet usage and alert a librarian when someone objects to material being viewed on the Internet. She said the system works very well, and most people are cooperative when they are asked not to view certain Web sites on the Internet.
“Our staff don’t go around policing screens, but we are responsive to other customers who are offended,” Matthews said.
“As a public library we believe it’s our responsibility to have access to constitutionally protected materials. We don’t feel that would be possible if we were to filter,” she said.