The meeting of the London Public Library Board took place last night and from the morning-after article in the London Free Press, it sounds like the meeting didn’t go as smoothly for LPL CEO Anne Becker had hoped:
While the board meeting began with its chair, Svetlana MacDonald, cautioning members to listen to, not discuss, the issue, new board member and city councillor Nancy Branscombe quickly moved to rescind the filter program.
Told she had to give notice first, Branscombe, who didn’t attend the May meeting when the measure passed, suggested it be considered at the next board meeting, a direction that led four other board members to raise hands in support.
However, the filtering software is still going to be applied to the majority of adult computers in the library, as per Anne Becker’s recommendation, probably at least until the move is reviewed at the next Board meeting.
It is important to note, I think, that Anne Becker is not a librarian. She has an MBA and a background as an insurance executive. With a library school at its doorstep, the London Public Library could be a model for intellectual freedom, collections, programming, and innovative service. But no. Becker’s closing statement in the London Free Press article about the filtering critics not having “tested the software.” It seems that she’s missed the point entirely.
A participant on the link to an interesting article from genderIT about content regulation, censorship, and feminism:
Filtering software technology, regularly implemented to ‘protect’ internet users from the harm of pornography, has been known to over-block content on the internet, including information about women’s sexual and reproductive health. Women’s movements have struggled for many decades to articulate female sexual agency that is active, desiring and not necessarily appended to heterosexuality. Is it then useful, to call for censorship just when heterosexual, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and transsexual female representations of sexuality are beginning to populate cyberspace, by naming them as the moral and legislative equivalent of pornography?
According to the Free Press article, that’s exactly what Roma Harris was talking about at the Board meeting. Was Anne Becker listening?
-SIO