Hi and thanks for having me here. Congratulations to all of you, I’m honored to get to share this important and transitional moment with you.

Like you, I went to an alternative school, Hampshire, and am similarly interested in personal vision and radical thinking as the brochure says that you are.

By way of introduction, I tell people I’m the most famous librarian in Vermont [not as fancy as you might think], an “internet folk hero” dedicating her life to eradicating the digital divide in the US and helping turn libraries into their democratic ideals free from the influence of bad technology, bad people, and bad laws.

It’s as true as any of the other “who I am” explanations. At some level, realistically, what most people in the world know about you is what they see, what you tell them, maybe combined with what they can corroborate elsewhere. It’s important to have a good story and in the age of limited internet attention spans, it helps if it’s short. Wikipedia calls me an internet folk hero (and no I didn’t write that myself though I suppose I could have) and I like that & I’m sticking to it. It’s not actually so tough to be a folk hero, and I think it’s one of the natural paths from this sort of starting point, where you are now. I’ll talk a little about how I got here.

Part one is framing

I’ve got slightly different answers to the “who are you” question depending exactly on what’s asked.

- what I do for a job

(“um I run a big Internet community”)

- how I spend my time

(“I stare out the window and look at birds in-between answering a lot of email and making Keynote slides and reading books for hours in airports”)

- what I love doing

(“I teach email to old people… no seriously it’s the best thing there is”)

but I’m one of those people with a poor life/work balance, or maybe a great one, depending on whether you think that your small-w work and big-W WORK [your calling, your passion, your raison d'etre, whatever you call it] should be the same or different.

Mine are the same: I love the democratizing power of the library and the internet and share it with as many people as possible. I lucky that I get to do this for a job … but I did some work to get to this place, and also some not-quite-work. And the good news for you guys is that for the most part you now get to spend some time watching yourselves, out in the great wide world, figuring out what your Work actually is. It’s a time for doing and you can, in fact you should, put off reflecting until later. Now is the time for screwing around.

I live in Randolph, just up the road from here, and I spend a lot of time teaching people how to use computers at the local vocational high school in town. Every week I get to show someone the internet who has never seen it before; it’s great. I also travel around the country teaching librarians how to teach people to use computers. I wrote a book last year about the digital divide and how librarians can use their community resources to help people overcome it. I also run a giant community website called MetaFilter that has an online Q&A subsite where the community can ask each other questions. That’s how I met Braja, she’s my internet friend. As much as I think the library is important, I think it’s more important that people learn to answer their own questions, ones they maybe don’t need a professional for

I’m the resident librarian there, sort of, though my title is COO or “community manager” depending on whether I’m being fancy or not. You may notice that none of these jobs I’ve mentioned involves working inside a library. The good news is that this is fine. It’s an exciting time to be a librarian, even just part of the librarian diaspora. Even in the age of “You can find it all on Google”. We’ve got a whole Justice League of librarians working undercover on the internet and elsewhere, fighting for your cyber rights and other things. You probably know a few. If you don’t, you probably should.

So, you’re excited about your Big-W work… find ways to make it sound exciting to other people.

So, part one is framing your issues…

Part two is preparation

When I graduated from Hampshire College (a place a lot like this) a million years ago, we had a commencement speaker who I had never heard of who gave us all some advice that was quite useful to me personally.

Her advice: get some sleep.

At the time I’d been working on my thesis — an analysis of generic pronouns in English, very important stuff to me at the time — non-stop for several solid months, and this was actually something I needed to do, REST. You probably do too.

But more to the point, “get some sleep” was a metaphor for the other things I needed to do in my life in order to be effective. Because as much as I also want to be happy, and loved, and secure and … oh I don’t know beautiful, athletic, something? what I really wanted was to change the world. It’s one of the reasons I went to Hampshire in the first place. I wanted things to be different, more like how *I* wanted them to be and I was idealistic enough to think I could do this, still do actually.

In order to do that, as much as I enjoyed just arguing into the wind about my great ideas, I had longer term goals and had to dig in and play the long game with people who weren’t necessarily working from the same playbook as I was. The long game doesn’t just take time, it takes stamina, endurance, some good nature, and grace. And you’ve got more of that if you’re rested, relaxed, at ease. Sleep helps that. Keeping your stress level down helps that. Eating lots of apples helps. I probably get more professional mileage out of not getting angry than almost anything else.

This is a difficult thing to manage if you get wrapped up in the 24 hour news cycle (what I sometimes call the fake news) and divert your attention with inconsequential bickering cultivated by people who are trying to sell you something. Or if you get crabby by other people’s bad behavior and it sets off bad behavior of your own. Stay calm, don’t get cranky.

This long game, which I wasn’t even quite aware that I was undertaking at the time, involved getting to a place where people would actually listen to what I had to say (more on that in a sec) because with an institution as stalwart and venerable as Public Libraries (like many others), you need to come to the table with your bona fides if you want people to pay attention to your advice much less take it. I’m not saying this is always right, just that this is how it is. Sometimes it’s good to know both what’s right AND what’s real.

So you’ve got framing, laying your constitutional groundwork…

Part three is communication

In my universe, people are saying libraries are in danger without filling in the rest of the story … that they’re in danger because people have forgotten how to quantify the social good of democratic public institutions, forgotten how to value having an educated and informed populace and decided that it’s somehow appropriate to employ “belt tightening” library closures in our communities that disproportionately affect the poor and working class. People are using public libraries in America more than ever before, 71% of libraries report that they are the only source of free access to computers and the internet in their communities. They’re essential, not endangered. Or maybe both…

Conflict makes good drama, sells more newspapers, gets more clicks and keeps people from changing the channel but it’s only a small part of the whole overall story, and it’s important to know and to tell the whole story, and be well-rested enough to tell it as many times as it needs to be told, to the right people. The long game, keep telling that story. Keep saying what’s true.

For me this includes talking about the digital divide, reminding people that a third of Americans don’t have internet at home and 1/5th don’t have any internet at home AT ALL. Explaining how challenging it is to teach people to use technology as library funding is getting cut, and how crucial.

These sorts of talking points, updated as they change, made up many of the small campaigns in my larger crusade for public libraries and free information. And over time, it added up. I had a little blog. I talked about what I cared about. I went to conferences. I spoke to people. I always emailed or called back when a reporter contacted me [which they do often when you're on the first page of results for the word "librarian" on Google and your phone number is on your website, reporters are sort of notoriously lazy] I noticed that slowly, over time, people were *asking* me what I thought, more than I was just simply telling them. Every state has a library association. Every association has an annual conference. There are lots of opportunities to step up and tell your stories no matter what profession you’re in.

I didn’t overthink and stay uninvolved because I thought maybe I wasn’t the right person to talk about something, I got involved in what was interesting to me, and I did the work. I went to the Democratic National Convention as an “official blogger” in 2004. I got to meet Barack Obama. I’ve recently been involved in Harvard’s Digital Public Library of America project as an “independent librarian.” It’s a lot of meetings (some of them early) but with a lot of interesting people. I tell them about what I do and go home and tell people about who I met and what they’re doing.

Some of what I do is go places that “my people” don’t go to, represent us, and then come back and tell my folks what I found there, whether it’s being a techie at a librarian conference, a librarian at the tech conference or a rural librarian at the big city meeting. The world needs people who stay and people who roam, cross-pollinate, bumblebee style.

Sometimes I was surprised that I’d be one of very few people in my communities speaking out cogently and clearly for my ideas, against filtering, against digital rights management, for copyright reform and open access, that sort of thing.

Dorothy Day who founded the Catholic Worker movement sometimes called this isolation of idealism the “long loneliness” and said it could only be solved by the love that comes with community. I feel that by sharing your ideas and ideals with others, you’re not as lonely.

So you’ve got framing, preparing and communicating…

Part four is reflection, perspective & recommitment

I’m not so in love with my ideas that I think they’re right for everyone (copyright has its roles, filtering can be okay in certain circumstances, drm may be inevitable), but in the big tug of war that we cynically call the “marketplace of ideas”, I’m okay being way out on one end and helping nudge or pull people away from the comfy center, the place where you wind up if you don’t make many choices.

By doing the things that I’d enjoyed, and arguing for the things I’d cared passionately about, over time I’d created a career and something of a reputation. In the looking back over what I’d been doing it was easy to say “oh hey I meant to do that” but really I’d had no idea, for a long time. By reflecting over what I’d been doing, seeing my priorities laid out as an accumulation of past choices, the path was clear in hindsight, and it also offered me a direction forward. You think you know what you want, sometimes, but there’s clarity in seeing your desires made real, distilling and determining your priorities through your actions and what you’ve been able to do. And if you look back and say “That wasn’t what I wanted” you’ve got the option to adjust, figure out what went wrong and correct it.

The choices I had been making, though they seemed sort of small at the time — to move to Romania between my first and second years of library school, to take a job working for VISTA after library school instead of an office job, to move to Vermont instead of stay in Seattle, to live in a small community instead of one with better restaurants, to say yes when the reporters called or people asked me to write things, to say no when people wanted to advertise on my site– added up to being the primary components of … me.

Along the way I got a fair amount of pushback, people at every transition point saying the way I’d done things in this stage weren’t going to work in the next. In high school they said “that’s not going to fly in college” In college, it was grad school. In grad school, it was “That’s not going to work in the Real World…” They were well-meaning, but usually wrong. I never did have to get up before 11 am unless I wanted to. I didn’t have to cut off my dreadlocks until I wanted to. I didn’t have to move to a big city. I didn’t have to get a PhD. I didn’t have to settle down.

You all didn’t come to Goddard, to do “individualized studies” because you wanted to take the obvious or simple or pre-determined path. People in Vermont really like to quote Robert Frost’s Road Not Taken poem without maybe understanding that, as Frost himself put it

“It was my rather private jest at the expense of those who might think I would yet live to be sorry for the way I had taken in life.”

Frost wasn’t sorry; he was an unrepentant curmudgeon. His poem, if you give it a close read, was about two identical paths and after-the-fact rationalizing that the choice you made was the right one. Re-writing your own story and giving yourself a more active role after the fact.

Your time here (or virtually here) has been about cultivating your interests, nurturing your abilities, finding your narrative whether it’s through dancing, drumming, singing, writing, filming, educating interpreting or re-interpreting. This big accomplishment becomes, over time, one small part in your long story.

You may not also know that there is another Jessamyn West–actually there’s a third Jessamyn West, a holistic horse masseuse living in the Pacific Northwest–an author who was popular in the 50s and 60s who wrote a lot of novels about being a Quaker in frontier America. Her book Friendly Persuasion, about pacifism in the face of the Civil War, was adapted into a movie in 1957 starring Gary Cooper and Tony Perkins and made her a brief celebrity.

She used that celebrity somewhat as a platform for her ideas. She was an outspoken… I’m not even sure if you’d call it feminist, but she had a lot of strong unapologetic female characters in her works. She wrote from her bed, where she was the most comfortable, and was an advocate of all-day pajamas (as am I), solitude and other not-particularly-normal life choices for women at the time. Her story is one I keep with me and this quotation from her is one I keep close to my heart.

“You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood – and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life.”

Choose wisely. I could wish you luck, but you won’t need it. Pace yourselves. Remember that everything in our lives is part of it. Tell your own story and make sure it’s a good one, don’t worry so much about keeping it short.

Thank you and enjoy yourselves.

My employer, MetaFilter, has a strong social component as well as claiming over 200 librarians among its members. While the site itself is fairly restricted to bloggish interaction, we have some super-organized members who like to compile Best Of sorts of lists over on our wiki. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but the Read Me page on the wiki now has links to over 1000 threads worth of book recommendations.

Last week I was down at Simmons where I gave a really short talk about … talking. Basically talking about what public speaking entails and offers in the larger world of librarianship. It’s called “You Do What For A Job?” and you might like it.

So, since I was sticking around town working this month I didn’t go to Internet Librarian or most of NELA, and a few smaller conferences. It was fun to read other people’s summaries, and occasionally real-time reactions, for all the presentations. I’ll be making a sort of “what I learned from not going to conferences” post sometime in the next few days. For now, I’m done with public speaking until March and I’m pretty okay with that. It’s been a fun Fall season.

NCRL’s filtering policy does not prevent any speech and in particular it does not ban or attempt to ban online speech before it occurs. Rather, it is a standard for making determinations about what will be included in the collection available to NCRL’s patrons.

Thus, NCRL’s filtering policy, when applied, is not comparable to removal of items from NCRL’s collection, but rather acquisition of materials to add to its collection. NCRL has made the only kind of realistic choice of materials that is possible without unduly and unnecessarily curtailing the information available to a bare trickle — or a few drops — of the vast river of information available on the Internet.

This may be the set up for a very interesting lawsuit. I hope they appeal.

“Government imposed censorship is very different from censorship imposed by a parent.”
“Internet content filtering does in fact have flaws… It overblocks.”

Thanks to Sarah for the heads up and kudos for the ACLU using your research. I find that numbers, not emotional appeals are what are going to really help make the case against governmentally-mandated filters. Here’s hoping.

Now that Margolis’s firing is about to be made official, the city is being treated to a campaign of disinformation suggesting that, while Margolis was good for the historic central library in Copley Square, his track record in the branches was lacking. This is rubbish, so out of line with reality that it approaches a big-lie strategy: tell a whopper with enough conviction and frequency and you can get the public to believe it. It will probably work. Also wrested out of context are recycled versions of Margolis’s unwillingness to install Internet filters — except for children — on library computers. Free speech may be uncomfortable at times, but it should never be so in a library. It is the branch libraries, though, that are now center stage.

1. Filtering is expensive but no one knows how expensive. Should a porn filter for your library cost $100 or $1000 or $10000? Should you pay less for one that works less well? Is it even acceptable to have one that doesn’t work? Do any porn filters actually work completely well, any at all?
2. The filter in the story was created, at a cost of $84 million, and would be made available free to every family in Australia. This is in addition to the government wanting to require all ISPs to make a filtering option available with their services. A quick read of this second article indicates that the filters aren’t just for porn, or rather there are varieties of the filter one of which also filters chat rooms. Now chat rooms can be used for porn but they can also be used in many other legitimate ways. I’d argue legitimate uses account for almost all chatroom use among children and young adults. So, beware of mission creep. If you’re trying to stop kids from looking at explicit sex pictures, that’s one thing. If you’re trying to stop them from communicating with others or being communicated with in ways you don’t approve of, be above board about it.
3. Any librarian who has to work with filtering software knows the ways that kids or others get around it. There’s the Google cache hack, the Google images hack, anonymous proxies, proxies from home and many many more. If you can get to the internet at all, you can figure out, usually, how to get to the rest of the Internet.

Want to try it yourself? Here’s some instructions.

According to the executive report: Library use is up up up, even at “one-room rural outposts” which are then contrasted with the “spectacular” Seattle Public building. I work in a rural outpost and let me tell you, no one likes to think of themselves as an outpost and the people who live there certainly don’t see their one-room library that way. Perhaps I’m touchy. Investment in e-books is up which is hardly surprising since they’re still fairly new as “book technologies” go. It’s also fairly concerning since e-books are rarely owned, often just rented. What does this mean for the actual capital of American’s libraries? Are we owning less but paying more? Additionally, people are still reading books (amazing!) I bet we will never see the ALA report that even implies that people aren’t reading as much as they used to, no matter how the numbers have to bend to support this. School libraries are still dealing with funding headaches.

The library community is still defending its users against intrusive government and censorship challenges. They don’t mention how many libraries and library systems have installed or enhanced filters that restrict access, but this number is pretty important too, and totally absent from the document. The report itself states that it’s only a “highlights” report which sort of contrasts with the title, but that’s not terrifically surprising. A few other observations and some pullquotes.

- We’re still measuring “visits” when we talk about who is going to the library. As near as I can tell a “visit” does not include a trip to the website or interaction with the library that does not occur inside the library building. For all of our 2.0 talking we’re still not totally validating “outside the box” library interactions at our highest levels. Huh. There is no mention of website statistics of public libraries at all. This has to change, and change quick. I think one thing that could rapidly change the way we think about libraries is if we would collect these sorts of numbers with the traditional library data we collect. Make libraries report their website statistics and maybe they’ll start looking at the website as a real library service. If we’re so techie now, why don’t we do this?

- “Virtually all (99 percent) U.S. public libraries now provide free public computer access to the Internet” 99% is a nice big number, but that would mean in Vermont we have two or three libraries that don’t offer this access. I wonder what their story is? I wonder how we can help them?

- “Academic libraries explored new virtual ways of providing services using technologies such as blogs, wikis, avatars, YouTube, Facebook, etc.” I know this is nitpicky, but this is a very short paragraph in a long document that dedicated nearly a page to “visits.” Where are the stats for this statement? It’s as easy or easier to track contacts in YouTube, for example. Why aren’t we seeing those numbers? If we want social tools to move beyond flavor-of-the-month status, we have to treat social tool interactions as “real” library interactions. Also, the mishmash of technologies, tools, and plain old nouns (avatars?) in this list implies strongly that whoever wrote this was either pressed for space or unclear on the concepts. Where is IM?

- Don’t miss this conclusion they draw when discussing the school library shortages: “Often the cuts in school libraries are being linked to the key requirements of the No Child Left Behind legislation.” While using the weak verb “are being linked” is a bit of a cop out, we are seeing that schools which are short of funding are having to channel that funding into getting the numbers required by No Child Left Behind and away from general educational resources like the library. The impact of this is felt disproportionately by poor and rural areas. This is shameful.

- Salaries rose but there is no indication if they rose ahead of or behind inflation and cost of living. We’d know more, but further data is contained in an ALA-APA report which you can’t get without paying for.

- Serials expenditures are up 273% While the report implies that this is because libraries are buying hard copy and electronic versions of the same titles, it’s more likely that libraries are simply being gouged by vendors who have mysterious pricing rubrics that seem more based on ability to pay than any cost of delivering or preparing services. Why aren’t we more critical of this number? Why aren’t we more critical of this disturbing trend?

- They mention Ilovelibraries.org. My impression from hearing about it: someone is not learning the “don’t make your website a destination, become part of a community” lesson from the 2.0 world. My impression on clicking that link: embarassed as all hell. It’s marketing 101 to not announce a website before it’s ready to go live. The fact that this isn’t done by National Library Week is clearly a case of someone dropping the ball or terribly misjudging how long it takes to make a project like this go live. The “we’re not ready” page could have been a nice savvy page that made people smile and maybe even bookmark it. Instead it shows a lack of attention and respect for my time. I typed in a URL I read in their report (a non-hyperlinked URL I read in an HTML document, geez) and it looks like someone didn’t even care enough to spend 30 minutes to make a nice page with margins and maybe a box to put the text in. It’s 2007, we expect more from the web.

- 80% of US libraries are rural. I have no idea how they arrived at that number or what it means. By population? By number of buildings? It’s almost impossible that 80% of Americans are served by rural libraries, so what is going on? I assume they mean buildings.

- Spectrum Scholarships are up. This is great. Thanks to IMLS for providing addtional grant moneys to put more students into this great program.

- The ALA came out against DOPA. This is good news. However, their stated position “DOPA, as written in the House in 2006, leads to a false sense of security while over-blocking constitutionally protected material.” They stress the business uses of social tools and other “legitimate purposes” which I think glosses over 1) there is nothing wrong with social networking generally, nothing at all. It’s no less safe than the mall. 2) just because something is used in a social sense doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value and shouldn’t be overlegislated by scaremongers who don’t understand it. I wish ALA had a more savvy response to DOPA, but I am happy they came out against it.

- The ALA is trying to attract more libraries to the E-Rate program so that they can get funding for technology. This is good. However, we all know that E-rate money comes with filtering strings attached. This is bad. Libraries should be able to make their own choices about what sort of access they provide to the Internet.

- Three sentences on Google. Eesh.

So, the news is good, generally. The ALA is looking medium-clueful which is up from not-at-all-clueful a few years ago, but there’s still clearly work to be done.

Bess blocks a very broad array of lawful information, and the NCRL has refused to unblock sites for patrons.

The lawsuit contends that the library system’s policy of refusing to disable its Internet filters at the request of adults who wish to conduct bona fide research or to access the Web for other lawful purposes violates the United States and Washington State constitutions. The suit seeks an order directing the NCRL to provide unblocked access to the Internet when adults request it.

As you may recall, CIPA mandates that libraries who get E-rate money “have the ability to block minors from seeing “visual depictions” of sexual activity” which usually involves installing filters.

However, the Supreme Court decision also made it clear that if these filters wound up blocking constitutionally protected speech from adults, there might be trouble. That is to say, the law was judged to be constitutional on its face, but it was undetermined whether the law was also constitutional as it is applied. This lawsuit may help untangle some of that

In the meantime, according to the Public Libraries and the Internet report issued by the Information Use Management and Policy Institute at the College of Information, Florida State University (at around p. 100 but read the whole thing) “15.3% (+/- 3.6%) of libraries [surveyed] said [t]he library has applied for E-rate in the past, but because of the need to comply with CIPA, our library decided not to apply in 2006.” This is a damned shame. The Institute surveyed almost 5,000 libraries, a pretty large group of libraries. To hear that over 700 libraries decided to forego E-rate money to avoid the burden of filtering… well what does that tell you?

1. If CIPA didn’t fix this problem — and recall, it was supposed to — why will this bill succeed where it failed? Have filters gotten better? Have the “bad guys” gotten dumber?
2. Doesn’t this create a class system of libraries where the ones who can forego federal funding can make choices that the ones who cannot are unable to make? Isn’t this sort of anti-American?
3. Doesn’t DOPA not solve any problem at all if it’s not applied to all schools and libraries and, in fact, the entire Internet, really? Does anyone have any data on where teens access the Internet besides school and the library? Is anyone doing anything about those places?
4. Isn’t having the FCC publish an annual list of chatrooms and social networking sites that “have been shown to allow sexual predators easy access to personal information of, and contact with, children” just creating a how to list for pedophiles and, as such, totally counterproductive?
5. Have any of you Representatives ever used a social networking site or a chat room?

Vermont is not one of the states that has its own filtering laws in addition to the laws laid down by CIPA. What I did not know was that twenty-one states have filtering laws that apply to schools and/or libraries. Some of these just require libraries to have an Internet use policy concerning public/patron use of the Internet, but many go much farther than that. The Utah code, for example:

Prohibits a public library from receiving state funds unless the library implements and enforces measures to filter Internet access to certain types of images; allows a public library to block materials that are not specified in this bill; and allows a public library to disable a filter under certain circumstances. Requires local school boards to adopt and enforce a policy to restrict access to Internet or online sites that contain obscene material.

The National Council on State Legislatures has a page outlining all these state laws with links to the actual state legislation: Children and the Internet: Laws Relating to Filtering, Blocking and Usage Policies in Schools and Libraries

[T]he ACLU is concerned that some libraries have independently chosen to block categories beyond CLAN’s minimum option. Four libraries reported such additional blocks on the ACLU’s most recent survey, while 18 libraries failed to respond to the survey, leaving the extent of over-blocking unclear. ACLU officials say that libraries that block these additional categories, which range from “gambling” to “illegal,” are creating a serious impediment to free speech.

Surely there’s some threshold where libraries can say, “We’ve got filters on the computers. We’re complying with all laws. We have library policies to address this. Get off our backs and let us do our jobs!” Instead, our representatives are meekly letting folks who don’t comprehend the situation sit in judgment.

Of interest to me especially are their descriptions of what libraries are or are not doing to inform patrons that they have rights to view blocked or filtered information that the software may be keeping them from viewing.

[At Providence Public Library] a librarian responded to a deactivation request – for a blocked Google search on nudism – with questions about subject matter, judgmental comments, and ultimately a refusal to disable the filter for viewing of what she wrongly characterized as “pornography.” When asked about the Providence library’s policy, the librarian said that it was to block viewing of pornographic matter, and that lifting the filter was not an option, even for adults.

Eleven libraries said they use no notification method beyond the blocking screen. This is problematic because the information provided by the Websense message is virtually useless. Patrons have no way of knowing that deactivation is readily available. To the contrary, the message seems to imply that deactivation is an administrative process requiring special authorization. In the absence of additional signage, nothing suggests that accessing the site is as simple as asking a librarian for help.

You might remember I had a little something to say about a library’s responsibility towards their patrons in a post-CIPA world.

The report itself is really grim. Many public library directors surveyed do not know how the blocking software works and have been given little or no training in how to use it. Many libraries are using the functionality of the blocking software to block additional categories [such as gambling, games and keyword filtering] that are not under the very narrow definition of what CIPA requires. This is their right [update: or is a fight for another day, on a separate topic] but the law does not legislate blocking gambling sites. Library patrons, in preparing this report, were met with probing and embarassing questions when they asked to have the filters disabled to view certain sites, including one library supervisor who asked a parent why her son would want to “cheat” at games by accessing a site on the Internet. This looks bad. It would be distressing if the only way we could get CIPA overturned is by having to admit that we’re unable to legally enforce it. On the other hand, perhaps this is just a deliciously sublime case of civil disobedience on behalf of Rhode Island’s librarians, in which case, bravo! [thanks kate]

It’s a tale of a typical “censorware shuffle”. The administrators have no idea what blacklists are in place and what’s blacklisted (they probably think censorware “filters pornography”). The service reseller (SonicWall), as a hardware manufacturer, just repackages the censorware blacklists (here, “Cerberian”). The censorware company will say the site fits their category, so it’s the school policy maker’s fault. Everyone’s fingers point to someone else. And the eventual effect of it all is that the government has a free hand to propagandize. While critics – who remember, are sometimes told by net-bubble-blowers that The Uncensorable Internet gives them an equal opportunity to be heard, because you can put up a website – are marginalized from important audiences.