GWINNETT COUNTY, Ga. - In a petition presented Monday night to the Gwinnett County library board, residents demanded that Internet access at the Collins Hill branch be suspended until stronger porn-blocking filters are adopted.
The petitioning residents, who claim that the filters do not work in accordance with state and federal law, also demanded that parents be required to give written consent for their children to use the Internet at the library.
Resident Ruth Hardy reportedly saw a 10-year old viewing pornographic material on a computer being used by another library patron. Hardy told the board in September that the patron was watching a naked woman gyrate on a bed.
"It looked like she was having sex there on the computer screen," she said.
At the meeting held Monday night at the Five Forks branch, Hardy was joined by other residents, including Claire Hertzler, regional director of the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families.
"A library which allows sexually explicit materials to be viewed on the Internet is no different from an adult sex shop," Hertzler said, "except that at the library, children are present and taxpayers are footing the bill."
Library board member Brett Taylor said Tuesday that Internet access at the library will not be suspended and the library's current filters "work well and in accordance with the state and federal regulations."
"We use the same filtering software that is used by the Georgia State Library System and 57 other libraries in the state of Georgia and numerous libraries and schools around the country," Taylor added. "However, with the rapidly changing Internet, lewd images do make it through the filter. For instance, the filter cannot filter email or images on news websites. Additionally, photo-sharing websites ... sometimes contain images that are offensive to some, though not pornographic.
"There is no filtering technology today that can filter based on graphic images. Additionally, some of the images that are considered offensive to some are legally and constitutionally protected works."
Florida-based attorney Lawrence Walters said that if a library is supported by federal funding, it is up to the library to operate in good faith and impose filters against material it deems harmful. No federal law orders libraries to use a particular type of filter, he said, and each library's governing board is to decide what kind of filtering system to use.
Walters said filters are not 100 percent effective.
"It is becoming increasingly difficult to filter everything that the libraries want blocked," he said. "It is very possible that the image that came through came from a user-submission website. There is so much content out there [that] is not labeled as adult entertainment and is just posted by people. It is almost impossible to block or filter this content because it is not coming from a particular pornographic website that is labeled that way, and you would have to know what kind of content was going to come up ahead of time. The filters do not work on Web 2.0-type material."
According to Joan Irvine, executive director of the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection, libraries should not be responsible for filtering Internet access.
"Libraries should not have to filter," she said. "Adults should be responsible and not view adult content where children might see it. It is no different than what a responsible adult should do in their home."
