Given your ideas about public libraries and education, with which I agree, maybe money would be better spent running an education program through public libraries, about what is on the net. Maybe ALIA could add a question to the survey – “would you prefer to have $x spent on installing filtering software or on running internet safety education programs?”

In some ways, I’m glad that parents don’t necessarily know what kids are looking at in the library – both on the net and on our shelves. I’m reminded of a 14 year old home schooler who used to come into the library and wrap a non-fiction book around a graphic novel so her parents didn’t realise what she was up to.

I recently attended the NetAlert Expo presentation, which was touring around the place, as it does. On the whole, I thought it was good, although there was a distinct lack of information that they were able to convey in the 2-hour timeslot. As such, there was a lot on the realities of internet-related harrassment, from cyber-bullying to webcam flashing to indecent “chat” interactions to online predators collecting personal information and stalking people in real life.

However, they also actively rejected the idea of web filters, interestingly enough, not so much because of privacy issues, but because it meant that parents could say “There’s a filter, therefore I don’t need to take any responsibility.”

Personally, I think that public libraries would be an excellent place for having sessions in educating parents in understanding exactly what their kids are getting up to, when they’re visiting social networking sites, chatting online, posting in blogs etc. The reality is that many parents have no comprehension of what kids get up to online, because they’ve never actually done it themselves.

That was more the message that I understood that the Netalert Expo was trying to express – take time to understand what your kids are doing. It’s not a matter of looking over their shoulder, but rather that you know that they have the ability to interact safely online. To do that, you need to know how to do it yourself.

Back to public libraries – I think parents often make the assumption that a public library is a safe place to leave a kid unsupervised to use the internet, again, because they don’t really understand the nature of it. However, any parent who has signed up a minor to a public library has taken personal responsibility for their child’s usage of the library’s resources, so at the end of the day, it’s still their responsibility.

Also – filtering in public libraries means that our professional knowledge and skills in promoting information literacy are being undermined, which I’m not particularly keen on. There needs to be more faith that librarians can actually perform up to their professional expectations, and if there’s a perception that we can’t, then something should be done about it.

Andrew