Poynter Online - Monday Edition

Poynter Online - Monday Edition: "Public libraries must begin taking steps to prevent child pornography and other harmful content from reaching the eyes of youngsters using their PCs under the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which went into effect July 1. If they don't, the libraries will lose critical technology funding from the federal government.

School administrators have largely been complying with CIPA, since they didn't join the American Library Association's First Amendment challenge to the law. And now the administrators report that Web content filters can be expensive, high-maintenance tools.

The law is similar, though different, from the 1998 Children's Online Protection Act, which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down last week just at CIPA was to go into effect. The justices in a 5-4 decision said the law infringed on pornographers' First Amendment rights.

In a recent survey of public schools sponsored by San Diego-based Internet and e-mail filter maker St. Bernard Software Inc., many school administrators said they lack the resources to block porn, hate sites, and other harmful content.

Web filters, said school representatives, are an imperfect tool, often blocking benign content and green-lighting pornographic images for viewing by minors.

The St. Bernard survey shows that poorly-trained staff and inadequate funding are making it hard for schools to maintain their filtering efforts. More than half (59 percent) of the 200 schools in the survey said they are having at least as much trouble preventing students from viewing inappropriate content as they did last year."


How are your libraries handling this?