San Antonio Will Pull the Plug
on Smut Surfers
San Antonio (Tex.) Public Library trustees added a clause to the library’s acceptable-use policy on October 27 that gives staffers the authority to terminate a patron’s online session and deny Internet service for two weeks “given cause to believe” that the patron has visited sites “which by local community standards would be obscene.”
Acknowledging that the action was prompted by Councilman Jose Menendez’s concerns about children’s public access to sexually explicit materials, SAPL Public Information Officer Beth Graham nonetheless characterized the shift as a “housekeeping issue,” since many trustees were not on the board two years ago to approve the library’s first Internet guidelines. Patrons will still have four “self-selected filtering opportunities” to choose between, ranging from unfettered access to blocking software coupled with links to child-oriented search engines such as Yahooligans, she told American Libraries.
After the vote, pro-filtering representatives from groups that included the American Family Association of Texas and Oregon-based Filtering Facts left the meeting, Graham noted.
Posted November 8, 1999.
|
