news-record.com

GREENSBORO — Using public library computers to search the Internet for inappropriate material soon may be a little more difficult.

The Greensboro Public Library board of trustees voted Monday to ask the City Council to consider adding software to filter inappropriate material from Internet searches. The filter would be limited to computers designated for use by children, as well as for users ages 17 and younger, and for adults who want filtered searches.

That is the less restrictive of two options city library Director Sandy Neerman proposed to trustees at their meeting Monday. The other proposal would have filtered all Internet searches by users of any age.

The City Council asked the trustees to address the issue two weeks ago after discussing reports of “inappropriate behavior” at Central Library.

Either option would cost up to $20,000, depending on the software.

The City Council will receive the recommendation at its 5:30 p.m. meeting today.

Neerman said the library system must balance protecting children from inappropriate material with its duty to provide access to information.

“There’s not one solution to Internet safety,” she told trustees.

A filter — whether wholesale or tiered as the library trustees recommend — would become part of the library system’s overall computer-management system, she said. The library operates 230 public computers with Internet access, 105 of them at Central Library.

The library system offers Internet safety education and requires computer users to log in with a library card and to sign an Internet usage agreement each time that prohibits certain conduct, such as viewing pornography.

Violators can be banned, anywhere from one day to permanently.

In January, the library added new software that slows downloads of inappropriate material. And security staff and librarians keep an eye out for inappropriate use.

Councilman Danny Thompson spurred the request for restricting computer use after producing at a council meeting a stack of reports of incidents of what he called “indecent behavior” at Central Library for the first six months of this year.

The reports show that more than 114,000 people used the computers at Central Library during that time. There were 157 incident reports — violations of library rules such as sleeping, disorderly conduct and computer misuse.

One of those incidents involved pornography and 17 involved computer misuse, which can include accessing inappropriate websites or material.

Central Library issued 85 bans during that time period for various reasons.

Inappropriate computer incidents dropped from 89 in the first six months of 2009 to 18 during that same time period this year, after the new software was added to slow inappropriate downloads.

“We have taken actions, and they’ve worked,” library trustee Donna Anderson said.

Anderson, who home-schools her children and takes them to public libraries once or twice a week, said she wouldn’t trust just a filter.

“It’s a false sense of security,” she said.
 

Contact Jennifer Fernandez at 373-7064 or jennifer.fernandez@news-record.com