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Introduction
After the Supreme Court's decision that the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA) (2000), which required school and public libraries to place filtering technology on all of their computers, was constitutional, public libraries have had to make the decision whether to filter Internet usage or forego federal funds. Although many libraries cannot afford to offer Internet service without the government money in the form of E-rate and LSTA funding which assists libraries in both purchasing computers and paying for Internet access, many libraries, such as the public facilities in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, have chosen not to filter, relying on local and state funding to maintain services.
Many libraries are choosing to forego federal funds because they believe filtering is a form of censorship. Although public libraries, as a rule, do not collect print pornography for their patrons, and certainly no library can collect child pornography, no filtering software currently available is able to block only pornography and child pornography. Thus, libraries feel that the overblocking of nonpornographic websites results in censorship. This overblocking coupled with the fact that, despite the best efforts of filtering companies, some pornography may still get through the filter (underblocking), causes some libraries to dislike filtering. But, despite the law, what is a librarian's duty to children and to parents to make the library a safe place for all? Many children do not want to access pornography, but even if they do, their parents may not want them to have access to it. Librarians, as the gatekeepers of information, have a duty both to provide information to people of all ages, and to allow parents to make moral decisions for their children concerning the information they can access at what age. However, parents see the library as a place where their children may play and explore with minimal parental supervision. If librarians provide no supervision and parents are under the impression that they do, then children are placed in a position of being at risk perhaps through exposure to pornography through Internet searches they perform or through accidentally viewing pornography on another library patron's screen.
Although much has been written concerning CIPA (2000), many articles have focused on the First Amendment rights of youth to access...