It’s Sunday afternoon, and you’re stuck on the
fourth floor of Young Research Library desperately seeking sources
for the term paper you’ve been putting off for weeks.
When you find that the book you’re looking for isn’t
on the shelf, you head to the computer station to double check the
call number.
But there’s a guy already in front of the monitor. A
creepy guy.
“When I’m done looking at my porn,” he says,
“you can use the computer. Come back in 20
minutes.”
This actually happened to a UCLA student according to Gabriella
Gray, the electronic services coordinator for YRL.
“The terminals were put up on the upper floors for quick
look-up, but people (who want to look at pornography) tend to go to
the computers tucked away in the corner,” Gray said.
Although UCLA libraries do not apply filters to the Internet,
the student complaint resulted in the computer terminals on the
upper floors of YRL being rewired to allow access to Melvyl and the
Orion2 catalog only. All other library computers continue to have
unrestricted access to the Internet.
The issue of whether libraries should limit access to
pornographic Web sites has been a hot topic. On one hand, public
libraries are increasingly under pressure from the Children’s
Internet Protection Act, a law implemented in 2000 which forces
libraries to block access to Internet pornography or risk losing
federal funding. The American Civil Liberties Union and the
American Library Association have since teamed up to represent
libraries facing litigation under this law, and have been largely
successful.
“Lower courts have held that when a public library
provides Internet access, they’re setting up a public forum,
so they can’t start blocking access to that forum. The First
Amendment then prohibits the library from selectively blocking
access to some part of that Internet forum,” said Eugene
Volokh, a UCLA law professor.
On the other side of the debate, librarians in the Minneapolis
Public Library have recently filed suit against their employer,
claiming they are victims of sexual harassment due to being exposed
to pornographic Web sites in the course of helping library patrons
working on computers.
The overwhelming view of most UCLA librarians, however, is that
protecting students’ access to information is more important
than any momentary discomfort they might feel when confronted with
adult material on the Web.
“We’re a research library, and it’s
conceivable that a student would have to look at pornographic
material because they’re studying it,” said Norma
Corral, a reference librarian at YRL.