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User: bwuhlman

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  1. Intellectual Freedom, From an Insider on Censorship - Libraries and the Internet? · · Score: 2

    I may be only a young lad of 19, but I have over three years of employment background with the public library system in Nova Scotia, Canada, first as a book shelver, and more recently as a web developer/sysadmin/techie.

    The Canadian Library Association's stand on Intellectual Freedom states:

    It is the responsibility of libraries to guarantee and facilitate access to all expressions of knowledge and intellectual activity, including those which some elements of society may consider to be unconventional, unpopular or unacceptable. To this end, libraries shall acquire and make available the widest variety of materials. [The full policy, if you're interested, is accessible from here.]

    A problem I recall being mentioned earlier (NZ, IIRC?) is that of limited bandwidth. Two of the three branch libraries within the system in which I work have a 56K Frame Relay connection; one, as part of a pilot project, just switched to ADSL.

    So, while some libraries don't explicitly censor pages, sometimes network availability or simple slowness of machines prevents some pages from being displayed correctly.

    One way I've seen this handled is through the use of a disclaimer. Its quite lengthy, so I leave its reading as an exercise to the reader.