Amy's post about not letting fear rule the day (below) is well-taken. DOPA is well-meaning, I'm sure, but I don't think it is going to dissuade people who really mean to do harm. All it'll do is add another frustrating bureacratic layer to our already red-tape filled lives. Those libraries who can afford to operate without e-rate funds will probably choose to do so, while the libraries who are financially crunched and NEED e-rate funding to survive, will have to divert even more of their resources from helping patrons to filling out reams and reams of forms...

You know another thing that is hindering librarians? I hate to say it, but I think it's our own frustration, and our wanting to take the easy way out. Some of us figure that if we just ban all the sites people (aka teens) might actually want to USE, then we won't have to spend all our time acting as traffic cops at the computers, "which is, after all, NOT why I went to Library School." (Did you go to library school to tell people where the bathrooms are 12 times a day? Huh? 'Cause we do that too, but no one talks about banning public bathrooms in the library.)

What we fail to realize is that if no one is USING the library, then they are well within their rights to decide that they don't need us. Our current patron-unfriendly and paternalistic policies (and I'm not even talking about asking people not to look at porn in the library; I'm talking about libraries who say "you can't play games, you can't do IM, you can't use MySpace or Flickr") could end up helping to shepherd our future selves to the unemployment line when the library closes because we can't get funding.  ¶ posted by Mary Martin @ 10:50 AM