Speak directly with your library director, your state’s library association and dont forget your local library board. Additionally, if you know of great titles that deal with these issues, request that your library obtain them.

Librarians are put in tough situations everyday with these issues. I respect a parent’s right to monitor what their child is doing however I also respect my young patron’s right to intellectual freedom. Many smaller libraries lack the funding and manpower to fight these issues on their own and can easily succumb to the more vocal and conservative members of the community.

My point is-PLEASE don’t comdemn your library for these actions. As Beth said, its rarely our choice as we would lack funding otherwise (and all libraries are slashing budgets right now).

Because of the 2000 CIPA law, the federal E-Rate funding that is the only reason many libraries HAVE internet connections is contingent on filtering. (At my workplace, for example, E-Rate pays 80% of the T-1 bill.) But librarians pretty much universally HATE IT and fight it tooth and nail as much as possible. At my workplace, for example, we have software that specifically blocks not content type, but IP addresses of individual websites manually added to a list, and, haha, the list is empty! Go go information freedom.

As a general rule: 1.) school libraries have a lot more filtering than public ones – partly because of tighter laws about schools, and partly because in schools librarians are far less likely to have any power over networking policies. 2.) also in general, independent library districts (like mine) have more direct control, and consequently less filtering, than districts where IT policy is created and administered by city/county government rather than by library staff. AND 3.) there’s a hack: in most places where universal filtering is mandated, there’s also a loophole allowing any adult to be provided with an unfiltered connection upon request.

I’m really interested to see where this research goes. The same sort of research has been done extensively within the profession, but outside data and different methodologies=good! :-)