California: San Jose Revisits Library Computer Filtering

From the San Jose Mercury News:

Five years after San Jose officials rejected calls to block pornographic imagery from the city libraries’ computers citing the slippery slope of censorship, the city’s new chief librarian has quietly been revisiting the idea.
City librarian Jill Bourne said she generally does not favor censorship of the Internet on public computers, except when it comes to complying with state laws that protect children from pornography.
“To me this is not a political issue,” she said. “It’s an operational issue.”
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Filtering hadn’t been looked at in over five years,” she discovered. “The filters are evolving very quickly.”
She and her staff selected two filtering programs for test runs. One is Websense, a software program already on most city computers that protects the machines against cyber crime and malware and prevent users from viewing sexual or other inappropriate content. The other is SquidGuard, a free “open-source” program designed to control access to specific types of content on Web sites. Either would filter at a fraction of the cost cited five years ago, some $45,000 a year just for the children’s computers.
Even those on the council who opposed filtering are intrigued by Bourne’s new research.

Read the Complete Article
See Also: San Jose Public Library Commission Materials (Memos, Reports) About Internet Filtering from 2008
See Also: San Jose Public Library Computers – Internet Access And Use Policy
See Also: Take a Look at Some of the Blacklists that Will Work With Squid

Filed under: Libraries, News, Patrons and Users, Public Libraries, Reports