The Evil of the Internets

That could work, but from a service perspective, it'd still be a problem. A college kid that needs to see the site *now* is going to have a problem if he has to wait as much as 6 days to access the site -- and he'll probably need more than just one site unblocked. I have difficulty believing that libraries really have a problem with people accessing (visual) pornographic material on the net when anyone could walk by and see it and most libraries have stated rules about viewing such content, anyway. The likelihood of getting caught (since you can tell pornographic content from quite a distance and without trying to invade anyone's privacy) should be deterrent enough in most cases.

 

At a public library, if all it takes if for a patron to say "look, Mr. Jones, I'm following this link and got blocked -- as you can see it's a legitimate site and not a kinky one -- can you punch in your override code?" and then the librarian does so (keeping the code secure, of course) it's no more disruptive than any other request a patron makes. If it takes 5 minutes of work to whitelist something, then I agree that's a problem, but nonetheless, that's what library staff do is help clients -- lots of other client requests take some time to fulfill.

At a University library, I'd have very loose parameters, if any, for site access, as these students are all adults. Perhaps a blacklist for some of the truly, horridly raunchy sites, but that's about it.

 

Point conceded if the IT guy is willing to grant that level of access to the librarians -- that would essentially solve the problem-- but the truth is that I could really care less if a grown man chooses to view textual pornographic content on a library computer when said library already carries romance novels and other erotica. In truth, I fail to see a difference -- as long, of course, as a filter is in effect for younger card holders.

 

Either way would be fine, really. It wouldn't be all that difficult to code age into the library card's meta-data -- assuming, of course, that a library card number is used to access the public terminals as it is with my public library.

 

Library cards in Quebec (and I assume the rest of Canada too) are split into adult and youth already, primarily to determine what type of media can be borrowed and for how long. I suspect many libraries would find that kind of split useful, and if they implement it (or something like it) then having different internet access also based on the card is very easy to do.

 

Indeed.

So it should be easy to understand why exactly some of us don't welcome "just a little extra work that won't take much time" with open arms.

 

Yeah, but the government will increase its funding for the libraries so you can hire more help, right? Because we all know that library funding is high on all government spending priority lists

Seriously, though, I respect the work being done by librarians and I wouldn't want to make their lives more difficult.