Library policy goes beyond the porn
Broad new policy takes away your right to view material someone else doesn’t like
Anyone who doesn’t like what you’re reading or watching on an Ottawa library computer can make you stop, under a “refined” policy on public internet access the library is adopting.
Some patrons are using library computers to look at pornographic videos. People shouldn’t do that. But the policy extends well beyond that.
Back in 2003, the library board struggled with the porn problem when workers complained about being exposed to smut. The solution was to blank out screens after a period of inactivity and to make people sign in with their library cards. Patrons with adult privileges would get unfiltered access. The workers’ union accepted the compromise. The library won a national award for it.
Anna Basile, one of the library’s top managers, said in an email the problem now is different from what it used to be. Library computers have better screens, higher resolutions and more bandwidth. Everything, including smut, is more vividly visible.
“At the same time, the role of the library has changed,” she wrote Friday. “Libraries are no longer seen as repositories for physical items. They are recognized as community hubs — gathering spaces for a variety of purposes, and a diversity of individuals.”
This has led to “an increasing complexity in managing the display of web-based content in a public space” and the forthcoming policy update reflects that, she wrote.
This is a tough issue. Nobody taking their kids to the library for an afternoon wants them to see porn on a computer screen. So if the new rule just said, “Also, P.S., no hardcore porn videos where people can see them,” that would be difficult for anyone but the most rigid free-speech absolutist to criticize. But that’s not what the rule says.
The rule says that, if you’re looking at images or text “that may be reasonably considered offensive in a public setting,” you can be made to stop.
A librarian, upon getting a complaint, will ask you to knock it off. If you won’t, he or she will turn off your computer. The guidance to staff covers not just dirty videos, but also material that’s “graphically violent, overtly sexual, or that contains threatening language, to provide a few examples.”
This is not a narrow definition, nor a tight range of examples. In practice, it won’t matter anyway.
“(E)mployees are not expected to make a determination about offensive content,” Basile wrote. “As has been our practice to date, when a concern is raised to an employee, employees will approach the individual and indicate that a customer has found the material that is being displayed to the public to be offensive to them. Staff will ask them to refrain from displaying the content in public, and consistent with our past experience, we expect that in the vast majority of cases, customers will comply.”
Hard-core pornography is an easy case. Most cases aren’t.
The other day, a Tory MP called Environment Minister Catherine McKenna “climate Barbie” on Twitter, echoing a common insult from Canada’s right wing fever swamps, and reasonable people were offended.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s speeches contain threatening language — from the way he talks about protesters at his rallies to suggesting he’d be willing to nuke North Korea to the way he talks about Mexicans and Muslims.
Reasonable people might be offended by the work of rightwing controversialists Ezra Levant or Ann Coulter, which is copiously available online. Reasonable people might be offended by gangsta rap videos. A person might even feel threatened, sitting next to a patron avidly watching them.
Some people are offended by Muslim preaching, some by conservative evangelicalism, some by the aggressive atheism of Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.
Hitchens wrote a critical book on Mother Teresa called The Missionary Position and followed that up with God is Not Great: How religion poisons everything.
Traditionally, libraries have stood above all this. Librarians are among the greatest free speech champions we have. They don’t judge you or your interests or what you’re using their material for.
So in their stacks, Ottawa’s libraries have the complete bibliographies of Trump and Levant and Coulter, Harris and Hitchens. They have Mein Kampf and Das Kapital and papal encyclicals and Rules for Radicals and enough lesbian erotica to keep anybody busy for years.
They have 57 copies of “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F—,” which is really popular just now and on the library’s front web page as of Friday.
The library has the streaming rights to Sex Music: Sensual Guitar and Romantic Music for Sex, Lovemaking and Romance.
All of this is online for free, through the Ottawa library’s subscriptions.
We’re now looking at the peculiar possibility that you won’t be able to use a library computer to consume library material.
It’s material that you would be able to read or page through if you had it in hard copy, sitting in a chair. It’s a worryingly broad response to a real but much narrower problem. dreevely@postmedia.com twitter.com/davidreevely
Traditionally, libraries have stood above all this. Librarians are among the greatest free speech champions we have. They don’t judge you or your interests or what you’re using their material for.