Where I Stand — Daniel L. Walters: Libraries’ new world

Friday, Aug. 10, 2001 | 4:23 a.m.

Editor's note: In August Where I Stand is written by guest columnists. Today's writer, Daniel L. Walters, is executive director of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District.

MY FIRST BRUSH with censorship occurred when I was about 15. I found the book I was looking for in my branch library's card catalog, but it was not on the shelf. It was the early '60s, and I still remember the stern look and voice of the branch librarian when I asked her to put my name on the waiting list. She said, "Not without a note from your mother!" The book was "Catcher in the Rye." While the adults had uncensored access to the branch collection, my access was blocked by the librarian.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since those days when it was not unusual for librarians to guard neighborhood children from certain books, ideas and images. Our neighborhoods were small and secure, and our librarians usually knew our parents or had their own ideas about what was good for us.

Today's contemporary media is far less tame than the days when the most risque subject matter in the branch library was National Geographic and images in books shelved in the health, photography and art sections of the collection. These days Cosmopolitan is usually so provocative that it must be hidden at the grocery store, prime time television content evokes Congressional debate over its lack of suitability as family fare, and the Internet exponentially compounds all other cultural changes by providing access to objectionable content on every connected home, business, school, university and library computer.

Public libraries struggle like never before to reconcile their commitment to bring the joy of reading to children with the social and technological changes that have blown like a hurricane through our life and times.

As our neighborhoods and communities have become more diverse, it is more difficult to differentiate between what is OK for one young adult to read while not OK for another.

The courts have identified the public library as a First Amendment forum that is required by federal law to provide open and equal access to free speech and ideas, unless the nature of the speech violates the law. As a result, public libraries are required to find ways to deal with the breadth of print, video, audio, electronic and public programming that may be objectionable but protected by law. This is especially true of electronic content brought into public libraries through the Internet.

Attempts by the president and Congress to prohibit objectionable content from being displayed on public computers were immediately challenged by the American Booksellers Association, the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Library Association, among others. It was felt that the law imposed broad curbs on individual liberty.

The courts determined that if public libraries provide Internet access, they must provide unrestricted access to all protected content, not just the content that the state feels is appropriate. In effect, public libraries were forced to take the bad with the good, because the most problematic content on Internet PCs is subject matter that would never be purchased for a library's print collection.

Some argue that the courts have not been particularly good friends to America's public libraries, but I do not agree. Early in my career I was fortunate to work for a director who taught me that the strength of a public library's collection was its diversity. "If there are not items in the collection that make you uncomfortable, including ideas that conflict with your values, then it is probably not a very good collection." The point is that the integrity of the public library requires our capacity to tolerate ideas that make us uncomfortable.

The courts have sustained a similar vision with each determination that protects a library's mandate to safeguard library materials from censorship and removal just because items conflict with an individual or state agency view of propriety. It is important to remember that the American public library is a miraculous institution. It challenges us to understand that a forum for providing conflicting ideas is more crucial and vital in our democracy than our ability to suppress those ideas we find unacceptable.

In more recent rulings the courts have determined that public libraries can make different rules for children's access to the Internet, so the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District Board of Trustees has adopted a policy to filter all computers designated for use by young people. The district has set the filters to reflect the same collection criteria used for placing library materials kept in the young people's library sections of district branches.

Filters are far from foolproof, and parents are still encouraged to use the library with their children because there is no better influence on reading and studying than an active parent or caregiver. The district also provides an option for parents who want their children to have unrestricted Internet access to unfiltered PCs.

The Internet has brought many blessings to our libraries. We can now provide access to thousands of magazines, several encyclopedias and a variety of electronic content in all of our branches, even the smallest branch. We can extend this same access to our residents when they can't visit a branch but have Internet access at work, home or school.

But managing the problematic content in our branches has not been easy, and the new technology has often appeared to put us at odds with one another in our communities as well as within our libraries. As we move forward in the information age, public librarians will continue to wrestle with the challenges of bringing the best the Internet has to offer and the best way to watch out for our children.