 Our next session is all about filtering. Yay. Fear of filtering. And hopefully to allay some of your fears so we don't have them anymore. First up we have John Felton from the Library Commission. Okay. Hello to everybody here and abroad. For whoever you may be. Yeah, we're going to talk about, I know that's sort of an ominous title there, fear of filtering. I was thinking of Erica De Jong, I guess, when I... Anybody remember that? Fear of flying. Dirty book. But really what we're talking about is the reality today. This is a reality check. So we're talking about the reality of internet content management, not the hysteria, not the emotions. And some of you have probably already read my whole speech here, but I'll read it anyway. The thing is wherever your opinion falls in this debate we've all had for gosh a decade about whether public libraries should filter what customers can view on the internet. As librarians we really should be continually learning and keeping up with the status of that discussion, that argument. Since the 2003 Supreme Court decision, the American Library Association at all versus the United States, the Supreme Court said, the Children's Internet Protection Act does not violate First Amendment rights. Here's how we'll make that work. So, you know, there you go. Even after that there was quite a bit of uproar about what are we going to do, how awful is this filtering thing. So what we're trying to get to today is a little clear-eyed analysis of what the actual consequences are of complying with SIPA, the Children's Internet Protection Act. Now we aren't here to advocate that anyone say do one thing or the other. I think what we're trying to do today is, as I say, look at reality, look at what your choices are and the consequences of some of those choices. So, because this training event is, you know, it's about your library's technology infrastructure, your ability to provide the most effective access to information and resources on the web for your customers. And that's really what it's about. So part of your technology planning, like we talked about yesterday, has to be a consideration of how you intend to maintain adequate connectivity to serve your users, especially now when the economy is not so great. So what are the some of the methods you can employ to fund this effort? If you need to ask yourself, have you considered all the opportunities? Have you and your community, I should say, looked at all the opportunities? And one of those opportunities is applying for e-rate discounts on your internet service costs. But as many of you have discovered, you have to comply with SIPA to actually get money on your internet service costs. Now, I cannot find any national statistics. And I'm the data guy, you know, I'm the data services guy. I could not find any national statistics that counted the number of public libraries that do or do not filter. No one apparently is collecting the data. So I did my own little survey in Nebraska. And so we'll get to that later. But what I hear from Krista is, 86 of the 107 Nebraska libraries participating in an e-rate discount program, I hope you didn't say this yesterday, have received 60 to 70% discounts on telecommunications and or internet access bills. So, okay, given that, you have to ask yourself, if getting a large discount on your internet bill would help your library afford the costs of maintaining adequate broadband connectivity, would it? If the answer is yes, you have to ask yourself, can I reject this? Can I say, Fui? I'm not going to do that. And your community will probably want to get involved in this, too. Now, to my survey. I surveyed those libraries that I knew had filtered, had installed filtered. And I got that off the public library survey that we do every year. So there are like 87. And a third of them, a third of all of our libraries, which is about 269 right now, have installed internet filters. And the results of my survey, which was completed by 78 libraries, indicated that the most prevalent reason for filtering internet access was financial. Financial being, I want to apply for e-rate discounts. That's the number one reason why people would filter their internet. This was followed by the second most popular reason, concern for the library's image and reputation, and then by community concerns. People in the community said, you know, what are you doing here leaving this internet wide open? So those are the top three reasons why people do it. And a full summary of this is, of course, on your flash drive. If you want to see the results of that survey. So, you know, we're just going to kind of go through the whole reality of this thing today and see what people really experience when they decide to filter. So the first step, Christa, is going to talk about the myths versus realities in complying with SIPA. Okay. Thank you, John. We'll just close out your thing here. Okay. So yesterday I did do my presentation about e-rate and the basics of that, and I did a very brief discussion, not even a discussion, of SIPA because I knew we'd be talking about this today and getting into more details about it. So what I'm going to be talking about now is just the basics of what it is and then a few things that I've heard people say or I've read online that people say about SIPA and filtering that are actually misconceptions, confusions, misinterpretations of the act. So SIPA is the Children's Internet Protection Act. It was implemented in 2001 and run by the FCC, the same organization, same body that does e-rate. It was for the purpose of protecting the children from all the bad things on the Internet that was the reasoning for it. On your flash drives, I've also included the actual text of SIPA. As I said yesterday, it's not that long, 12, 15 pages maybe, and a one to two page handout from the FCC, a consumer guide to it, basically them breaking it down into the very specific, easy to read information about it. So both of those will help you understand it as well. And as I said yesterday, it requires three specific things that are required by SIPA. A technology protection measure, that would be your filter of some sort. Is this a software product that you buy and install on each one of your computers in your library? Is this something you install at your network level that covers anybody who accesses anything in the library? Whatever it is that you have, just something that they call their technology protection measure. In addition to that, you need to have a plan, an internet safety plan that explains how you're going to deal with this, how you're going to make sure the filter is up to date and kept up. What happens when someone does encounter something? What happens when someone wants you to turn off the filter? That is a requirement as well. How do you go through that process? What are the rules? You have to have a policy and a plan in place to work with all of this that you're doing. And then the last thing that it requires right now is a public notice and meeting or hearing. Basically, before you first implement doing these filtering, if you aren't doing it already, you need to let your community know and let them have a voice in what you'll be doing. Do they like it? Do they not? Do they have opinions? What is your local community's views on filtering and the things that should or shouldn't be filtered? If you already have a filtering that you're doing, you probably have already done these things, so it's not necessarily something you have to do now. If you've already done it and you've never applied for e-rate yet, but now you want to realize that you can, you don't have to go back and do all this all over again. You can say, we did that five years ago and we first set it up and you're good to go. So the first myth that I've actually heard some libraries say to me that the reason that they do not apply for e-rate is because in order to apply for e-rate discounts for their basic telephone service, they have to comply with SIPA. That's not true. There's no filtering on the telephones. Applying for telephone is a separate application than applying for your internet access. Both priority one, as I talked about yesterday, but telephone is one request you'd be making and internet is a different one. So you do not have to comply with SIPA in order to get just your basic telephone e-rate discount. It is just for internet access and then if you jump down to the priority two levels, your internal connections and your networking and anything related to getting your internet set up at your library. When we were first, when we've been doing this BTOP grant, we have had done some surveying of libraries involved in it and some of these things came from that that people thought that they couldn't do it because of this. And I also had people in some of my classes I taught last fall and over the winter say the same thing. Another myth that people have not said they know this, but they asked it a lot, what technology protection measures, filters must I use? SIPA must tell me exactly what I have to use. Nope, it doesn't. It just says you have to have one. You can use whatever you want. There is, it is a very, for good, actually for us, a pretty vaguely written law that it just says you have to have one and then lets you decide however you want it. Individual on each computer, something network-wise, whatever. And it does define what it is and what it needs to protect from, but it doesn't tell you what to use. So you can't call me or call the E-rate people and ask, please tell me which filter I'm supposed to be using, which software product, there isn't one. It's up to you to go and investigate them and decide which one works best for you, which one you like to work with for yourself. But it does have to do certain things. It has to block or filter internet access to visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography or harmful to minors. And also something specific here that you may or may not notice. It only talks about visual depictions. It doesn't say anything about text. I don't know if that's good or bad or not, but that is something that it does not say, it specifically says visual depictions is what the act is about. Next myth. SIPA only applies to computers accessed by children and or the public. And this is a question we actually had yesterday that someone asked. This is not true. It doesn't specify actually at all. What the wording actually says that a library must have a technology protection measure that on any of its computers with internet access, that's the exact wording. Now this has been discussed amongst us E-rate coordinator people and by people who train us on this. And what we do to decide how to comply with things related to E-rate is we just have to take it literally unless there's some sort of update or rule or something legal that tells us different. So it says on any of its computers, which means any of the computers that have internet access, which does include the staff computers. So you do have to have it also on your staff computers. However, like I said yesterday, you do have to also have the ability to turn it off. So you just have to make sure it's on all your computers. And then when your cataloger or whoever is doing stuff and work in the back room wants, you know, says, okay, please unfilter me because I need to do my job, then you just turn it off. But it does have to be on there somehow on any of the little computers that is owned by the library that have internet access. And that's what, yeah. And that leads to they can't be disabled or changed or made specific to what I really want to filter. That's not true either. You don't have to just stick with what is built into the filter and just everything is constantly blocked forever and you're stuck with it. I know some people's issues with not doing filtering is the freedom of speech. If I don't want to censor at all, they just philosophically, I will not filter because I will not censor. Well, you can pick and choose what you want to be filtering based on your local community's needs and what they want and what they say. And in addition, as I said, it actually is in the law that it has to be some way to actually turn it off when someone who wants to do, as it says, your bona fide research or other lawful purposes, of course, asks, you have to be able to turn it off. The easier the better too. A quick check box on something to turn off the filtering on that computer, just turn it off for that one person's session, however, but you do have to have a way that you can turn it off for them. So even though you are filtering your computers to get your discounts for e-rate, you don't have to necessarily say we're doing something horrible by censoring because you can always turn it off for someone who asks who needs to do something. If someone comes in with their own device, their own laptop and uses the library's Wi-Fi, we've got to filter that person's computer. And how the heck do you do that? That's their own computer. No, you don't have to. Same wording. It's any of its computers. It means the library's computers because it does say the library must have technology protection measures on any of its computers. The people who come into library, they're not your library's computers, they're that person's computer. So you do not have to filter theirs. Now you might have filtering at the network level that makes your Wi-Fi filtered. That would be a case where then they'd ask you, can you please turn it off because I'm on your Wi-Fi. You may have laptops that are it's the library's computers that need to have that filtering in effect. So you just have to be able to turn it off for them or give them a way to not have it beyond their computers. My library can't receive e-rate funds for internet access or internal connections. The two things you have to have filtering in order to get until you've complied the SIPA. Meaning I'm not even doing it now, so I can't get any discounts until I figure out what the heck I'm going to do. What am I going to use? I've got to go through these public meetings, get the board to agree, whatever else I have to do. That's actually not true. They give you three years in a process to e-rate does to let you get your SIPA compliance going. So you can be receiving discounts already for a couple of years before you've got it completely enacted. They actually have spots on the forms when you're applying. If you are going to be applying for internet access or internet connections that say we are undertaking actions currently to comply with SIPA. So when you first apply, if you never had before, you can say we're starting to work on it now. But you don't have to have them in effect yet and you can still get funding, a discount for that first year. You can also do it for a second year if it's taking a long time. You just ask for a waiver and let them give you a second year. By the third year, you do have to be in compliance. So they do give you some time to get it all figured out. So you can start applying for your discount for internet access, working on the SIPA and then be in compliance by the third year. Tracking internet usage. Do we have to track what people are looking at? What if they're doing? Nope. It actually says there's actually a disclaimer about privacy as part of the act. This is one thing a lot of people are afraid of too. I don't want to track what my people are using. It's privacy issue. Exactly. It's right in there. Nothing says that can be tracking internet use by either minor or adult. They do actually mention both of those specifically in there. So they don't want you to track it and you shouldn't be tracking it. So don't have to worry about it at all. Anything else that I haven't thought of that you're wondering about SIPA? Those are the ones that I've heard people have asked me about. I've read articles of people talking about it online or blog posts or things. Is there any other questions you guys have had about complying with it or what it actually says that I haven't mentioned? Any here or from the outside world? Yeah. Well, that's one of the big issues. The question is, is there a filter yet that really does look at a picture and say, oh, this is a bad picture. This is a good picture. It depends because sometimes on the same site with a picture will be words and you can use that to kind of in a way block it. That's one of the questions to have decisions to make about it, too, is what filter am I going to use? What does it actually do? What can it filter? What can it do filter? And part of it, take deciding, is this the best product for me? Is there a different way I should be using? There's not just one. Do you have something to say? I have. Do you want to use a mic? Yeah. I have heard of software that will do that marketed to like home users for kids. I have never heard of a library trying to implement that sort of software that would be acceptable to the library to pull up just filtering literally of straight images. It goes off of flesh tones. Yeah, I mean, the technology does exist. So it's going to also filter out your people playing in a swimming pool? Possibly, yes. We have a question from Scott Spluff. What if a child asked you to turn off the filter? No, as you saw in the law, I did say it had to be an adult request to turn off the filter. What's the age? 17. Yes, that's right. 17 or younger. Oh, sorry. I was thinking about the opposite of not being able to. But yes, you have to be 17 or older to request to have it turned off. It's another question from Norfolk, which I don't quite understand. Are all the free filtering sites going offline? That is to say discontinuing services for free? I have no idea. All is a big and call-accompany-sing word. Someone here seems to know something about that. One of our attendees here said that there was a company that Microsoft was supporting, but a lot of them have already gone away. So they're not aware of anything right now that is totally free for them. Well, except for we do have, well, as far as companies and software products, we're not aware of anything that is out that is free. We have in just a few minutes later George Madsen is going to be telling us about a way to do it for free. Yes? With most of these filtering programs, someone asked you to disable this, shut it off, adult, whatever. When the computer is shut down, does that automatically go back by default to having it filtered again? Are you going to have to manually change that every time they get off the computer before a child can go on or what? Well, that would depend on how you have your computer set up. If you have it that every time you reboot, it goes back to whatever your original settings were, then yes, you just have to restart the computer and boom, everything is back just like you do for anything that you have in your computers. So it could reset it to the same thing. It probably depends on the product you're using too, because different products have different methods for doing that. Yeah, different products are going to have you do it different ways as well. So it will depend on which product you use. And sometimes what you get is a request for a particular page, depending on how your filtering is done, is it done by general topic or are there specific pages that you can unblock and unblock permanently? So someone can say it comes to you and say, your filter is blocking the breast cancer research page I'm looking at here. That's not really appropriate. You can, depending on the filter and how it works, go in and say, this particular page, don't block it at all, because really, it's not supposed to be. And so you can be tweaking as people are asking you for help for things like that you're filtering and what you are and aren't filtering, getting it to really what your community wants. But yeah, how your computer would be rebooted would possibly reset that. Did I reset that one? Well, that goes along with the deep freeze or centering guard that you guys have that on your computers, many of you that will reset your computers when anyone uses it. It would be the same kind of thing. Every time you're, after someone goes on one of your computers and downloads something they should endure, puts a document on it and you want to set it back to what you want the settings to be on it security-wise and that, this would be something that could be included in that as well. Another question from Scott Spluff. What is the average cost of filtering? I don't know. I don't know. Of filtering software? I have no idea. Yeah, there's... Can you use the microphone? It depends on how many computers you want to do. It depends on which type of filtering software you're using. You just have to go on each of the individual things and see which one gives you these features that you're looking for and then find the best price for what you're doing. It's completely up to them. It's not like there's a governing body saying, you're going to charge X amount. Yeah, so it's going to vary just like any other software product that you might be interested in and you're going to have to compare prices of the different ones and what they do, what they filter, and how they filter too. Some of them do it different ways. Some of them are much more big broad categories. Some let you get down into a real granular of certain words, certain websites, whatever. So that would be something you would have to do in your evaluation of what filter you might use. Any other questions? Yes. Another one from Scott Spluff. Do you think there will ever be a liability issue for not filtering? I am not a lawyer. Where's Richard? I'm stealing his. I can speak to that. Maybe. I think it's on already. It's already on. It's part of my presentation, but there was a court case. No, it went to the EEOC in 2001, I think, and there was a suit brought by 12 employees in Minneapolis. And they said that having patrons looking at sexually explicit sites created a hostile work environment, and the settlement cost was $435,000. So yes, there have. So yes. And it's not only will there ever be when there has been one. So there could be other ones. It just depends on what your staff and your community is going to want to have happen. Anything else? Okay, we will move on. You can also ask other questions later, of course. I do have some links here that, like I said, we'll be including them later. The FCE rate website, their information about SIPA. You can see what they think and say about it. FCC is on the website about it, and ALA has a page about SIPA in relation to library. So there's some three good resources that you can use. And of course you can call me and ask me, and I can direct you in the right direction for some things as well. And next up we have... I don't know what I saved here, but I'm going to say no. Pam is up next. Was it the spacebar? Yes. Okay. I'm Pam Serradi. I'm the director at the Huljajaria Public Library. I'm going to skip the history of filtering because I think we've kind of gone through that already. And so the next question is, why would we want to filter? So to step back for a second, I came from the private sector and came to public libraries in about 2005. Had no experience with filtering at all. Worked for lawyers. Obviously we didn't filter. And so it was something that I... It just wasn't on my radar at all. So when I was asked to do this presentation, I thought, well, I'd better do a little research. So one of the things that I found were some quotes about why people would filter in public libraries that filter. Librarians talked about being responsive to community concerns. One quote was, our patrons are happy that we have this type of filtering. We discourage indecent exposure while allowed on the screen in a public place. Our job is to give the public what it wants, not what it doesn't want. Another was politically it was the right move for our community, which is conservative. It makes us responsive to the requests and attitudes of our users. School and public librarians who are against filters base their opinions on a belief in intellectual freedom and the inefficiency of filters. Those librarians who oppose filters, but use them anyway, talked about their desire to remain employed. Here are some of their remarks. Filtering tries to enforce morality externally. We should be teaching internalized morality. I think that's probably a school librarian. I do lots of research on books and curriculum areas for teachers. I'm only 50% as effective with this insane censorship caused by filters. If kids cannot be responsible now, when will we expect them to be responsible when they retire? Internet filtering lets parents and others think that the inappropriate sites are blocked. In reality, not all of them are. It's impossible. It's mainly symbolic. And last, intellectually, I object to it. Conversely, I like my job. So what are the options? You have basically four. There's client-side filters, which involve software on each workstation. It can be customized, but it can only be disabled by a staff person with the password. Then there are content-limited ISPs. These are primarily used to provide Internet access suitable for children. This option provides access only to a portion of the content of the Internet judged to be safe and appropriate for children. This one, I think, is the pre-slope. China comes to mind, or Cuba, if you put in particular words into a search engine. The whole thing shuts down in a government-run Internet cafe. The whole thing shuts down, and the guys with the brown shirts come after you. In Texas, they have the Texas ISP Association and their logo is the Texas Legislature at Work. They require that all the ISPs put a link to blocking and filtering sites, companies that offer blocking and filtering products at the top of their home page. And the penalty for not complying is $2,000 a day, up to $60,000. So I think that's kind of interesting. Next is server-side filters, which are very popular for institutional settings such as schools or libraries. Filtering can be customized and different profiles used for children and adults. And last, there are search engine filters. Some search engines, such as Google, offer an option to turn on a safety filter to limit results. It does not preclude a user from typing in a direct URL to a problematic site. Others, such as Yahoo, offer a child-oriented version of their product that searches only child-friendly sites. So the two kinds of filtering software available are filters, keyword filters versus blocking. Filtering software denies access to a website based on its content, keywords, and blocking software denies access to a website, probably a domain, based on the offending site's URL. A weakness of blocking software is that each offending URL has to be hard-coded into the software, and so it would be very difficult to stay abreast of all the new sites coming online every day. A weakness of filtering software is that it bases its judgment on the presence of particular keywords. It's obvious that many useful resources may be blocked because of reference to a particular term. Another aspect of filtering software is the visual nature of pornography. We talked about this already a little bit. If offending keywords are also included, the site may be blocked, but if the keywords are in a different language, or if the search is conducted in a different language, they may not be. Filtering software is still quite undeveloped in its coverage of race, hatred, violence, recreational drug use, any of those other kinds of things. That's just a fact of how filtering is progressing. I suppose the financial motivations to develop that part is not very strong. How does filtering actually work? I don't think anybody really knows, except for the people who develop the algorithms for those companies, but we know that they filter by URL products that filter based on URLs will use a search engine, like Google, to run a search for trigger words, for example, live sex chat room. The list of results is then reduced by taking out those representing educational and governmental sites, those with .edu or .gov extensions. Of those remaining sites, the top 100 to 500 are blacklisted. Sometimes with spot checks by humans, and sometimes not. When the filtering program is in use, each set of search results is scanned against the list of blacklists before the items are displayed, so you never even know that those exist. If you filter by keyword, products that filter based on content analyze web pages as they're requested by the searcher, looking for keywords and phrases, and sometimes other factors such as banner ads, number of links, number of images, and so on. An artificial intelligence program then uses a substantive formula with a set of criteria to classify the pages as either allowed or blocked. You can filter by file type. We were talking about this a little bit earlier. Minority of products will allow you to block particular file types, such as videofiles.adi, audio, mp3 files, or still images, JPEGs. Well, there's obvious problems with that. Less than useful, since many porn sites, they're smart to this, they will embed their files in a flash or PDF wrapper, get around the block, and then you're just blocking the things that are valid content, not the ones that are prurient. Using one or both of these approaches companies build up lists of URLs and or keywords that are then blocked. Depending on the product, patrons will see messages about what was blocked and why. Some products filter out only the triggering content letting the rest of the content display while others will go further and block the whole page or the whole domain. Another differentiation is that some will allow you to see the page but will hide the triggering content on the display page, like the ad. Whereas others will let you see the triggering content on the search results page but won't allow you to click through. Which is nicer if you're actively managing your content filter because then they can ask you to whitelist a particular site. One of the challenges is to accurately understand your product's classification methodology, but it's a ferociously guarded trade secret. Most of the companies will not even give you examples of the effect of their blocking algorithm on particular categories. And so you're really blind. Libraries and others have conducted tests of different products with the results that are summarized on a chart that isn't... I don't believe on this presentation but it is on your flash drive in some detail. But in broad terms, most researchers agree that content is over-filtered by about 15%, under-filtered by about 15% and images and foreign materials have the worst filtering. Only about 40% of the explicit materials are filtered. The latest report was 2008 for the North Central Regional Library District and they said there was 93.1% accuracy in blocking websites and 48% accuracy in blocking images. So we really aren't to the place where we're actually complying with CEPA it's just a good faith effort to comply with CEPA. Okay, so what are the advantages for a library in filtering? You have fewer reported incidents of publicly viewed sites which make others in adjacent spaces feel uncomfortable or feel threatened. You have fewer reported incidents of prohibited behaviors. Those two kind of go together. Reduced risk of having minors accidentally encounter content that they may be ill-equipped to deal with. Using a filter places the library squarely within the expectations of the community for a safe, unthreatening, family-friendly public space. It can protect the library against suits by staff. We talked about that a little bit earlier, the one in Minneapolis. Filters with the ability to block against peer-to-peer file sharing can protect libraries against being found complicit in illegal behavior, music sites and like that. Use of a filter arguably serves the same purpose as your collection development policy only in the context of digital content. Especially in rural areas with small libraries and smaller budgets, we have the discount on internet access and telephone service maybe worth going after. And last, while a content filter should never be considered a replacement for antivirus software, many of them do keep lists of sites known to install malware and will allow you to filter those. So the arguments against using filters are mainly philosophical. As articulated by the ALA, libraries are defenders of the right of all citizens to information of their choice without censorship. Use of filtering or blocking software runs counter to the core values intellectual freedom and equity of access promoted by libraries. Filtering products need to be actively understood and managed so as not to over-filter content or assume that filtering is 100% accurate and reliable when, in fact, you don't have it set up right. Additionally, it's widely agreed that it's difficult, if not impossible, to adequately filter for images as required by the law. Under blocking can be an issue either due to the rapid availability of new content or if your license is allowed to expire. Use of filtering software weakens the librarian's traditional role of selecting content appropriate to the community, forcing reliance on the service provider who may make arbitrary decisions on keywords to filter without consideration of context. Even though patrons over 17 may request unfiltered access, there is no consideration given to their possible reluctance to do so, fearing the disapproval of the librarian might be particularly an issue in a small town or requirement that they perceive that there may be a requirement to cite reasons for their access and not even want to say that oh, I have just been diagnosed with breast cancer and people are private. The Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that filtering is more akin to a selection decision than it is to a deslection decision which requires more scrutiny. Justice Souter dissented, arguing that SIPA was burdensome to the intellectual freedom and First Amendment rights of adults and amounted to censorship in selection. Blocking software is by nature reactive and therefore perpetually out of date. Filtering software is insufficiently developed to be able to distinguish between offensive content and sensitive content or between mature and obscene. The equitable access question is illustrated by the need for local configuration of filtering software. If one library filters only pornography and the library in the next county additionally filters on nudism or violence or weapons there can be significant discrepancies in the content provided thereby infringing on the rights of intellectual freedom for those who only have access through the public library. As an example of the sometimes heavy-handed effective filters I have to share with you that I had to unblock nearly all the sites that I used to research this presentation. I don't get it because I only filter on pornography. But the only thing I can figure is that they're afraid that people will be researching filtering to figure out how to get around them. I don't know. But this experience has led me to rethink the settings on our filtering and maybe do some more testing. Or is that spacebar? Perceptions in the community. You know, it's really interesting but I've discovered that people are deeply suspicious of government tactics such as passage of SIPA or may willfully misunderstand the intent. I have had an experience where for a short period our filtering was not working and the story got around. Apparently somebody was seeing somebody else finding something that they shouldn't be looking at, turned up on Facebook, and the comment was, oh well, the library, they have to allow people to look at whatever they want where they won't get federal funding. No. But how do you counter that? It's Facebook. The use of filtering software in library environments may promote a false sense of security in some parents and be viewed as an opportunity to really disengage from their children's online experience, abdicating their responsibility for supervision to library workers. While we as librarians may know our limits, the public perceives libraries as safe places that they can send their children with confidence. We don't want to betray that trust either with the parents or with the children. My personal experience. I told you that I came into the library setting from a corporate environment. Had no experience with filtering or blocking software. And when I got there, we had four public workstations. Cyber Patrol had been loaded on those four workstations. They were all really old, and so the hard drives were very small and the little toolbar at the bottom would get... I don't know. You just couldn't get to any of the little icons down there, so it was very difficult to manage Cyber Patrol when you couldn't really get to it to turn it off or to change anything. You could, as I... It's been a long time ago, but I think you could turn on particular sites or allow access, but you had to do it at each workstation and to try to keep them all synchronized. That was just a real problem. So a couple of years after I started, I contacted the local ESU in Kearney. They provide technical support for governmental entities. If you're in a place that doesn't have any technical support, I suggest you talk to your ESU and just see if they will do something for you. They suggested to me that I use a filter that also functions as a firewall called Clark Connect. It's now known as ClearOS. This is a Linux-based server solution used in the school districts. So I figured it was good for the school districts because it's good for the library. I only filter on porn, sort of. It has phrase lists that you can pick which ones. There is hate things like... I mean, there's two or three pages of them, but there's hate speech, violence, drugs, recreational drugs, peer-to-peer sites, malware, porn. I filter on porn, malware, and peer-to-peer sites. I don't filter on anything, any of the other stuff that they offer. Lessons learned. Did I...? I didn't. Lessons learned. Even though this application is running in the background and there's a temptation, you know, it can just run on a desktop, so it's like, oh, just take one of the older ones that doesn't have to work too hard, make that be the filtering box. And actually, the ESU set it up for me that way. But it's actually a critical application, and it needs reliable hardware. Unless you can disarm it, you know, say, do not filter, before you take that computer offline, there will be no internet access in the building until you bring it back online again. I learned this the hard way. We had an incident right after we went live on Koho, which is a internet-based, you know, a cloud-based ILS, where all of a sudden we couldn't get to the internet, and I called the ESU, and they're working with me. Well, I can see your server, but oops, now it's gone again. And, you know, pretty soon it didn't work at all. We did not think to disarm the filter, and didn't really have enough access, I suppose, to do it. But what it turned out to be was the motherboard went bad on a brand-new box. And so I carried it up to them, and it was kind of like going to the emergency room. It was great. They put it on a gurney and rolled it back into the back room, and four men are down there with their hands down in the box. But they had to take it off to the operating room, and they came back, and they said it was dead. And I said, you don't understand. I can't check anything in. I can't check anything out. Never mind what those people want to do on public access computers. We can't work. I can't leave here until you give me something that will work. And so they swapped. They happened to have a motherboard. I loved this room. I had boxes, boxes, big boxes of ethernet cables. I was like, you supposed they'd mind if I liberated one or two? But they did get it working for me, and I had it back online by 7 o'clock that night. But one thing I learned that if you use a server-based filter, back it up. Back up your profile is what I mean. So that when you get the new box with the hardware on it, you don't have to completely reconfigure the whole arrangement. Also, make sure that after every renewal, you re-register, because if you don't re-register, it's not blocking. It's quite flexible, allowing you to set the level of enforcement of filtering, as well as the phrase list that you're filtering on. So you can say, I want to filter on porn, but I want to filter at a very high level, or a medium level, or a low level. And there's gradations in between. So you can kind of test back and forth. We're professionals. We know how to find the naughty sites. Then so we can test and make sure that we've got it set so that you can get through to the things that you want, people to have access to, without too many requests to whitelist sites. The server solution also allows filtering of all workstations in the facility or within reach of its signal, including laptops brought into the library, the people who are using laptops outside the library at midnight. All of those are filtered. So some experiences I've had with things that needed to be whitelisted. There's always things that get covered, and I don't understand why, but I am going to spend some more time with my filtering software. I have one gentleman who comes in frequently, and is a big conspiracy theorist. He's my best customer, as far as whitelisting things. But I did also have one that was a Nebraska.gov site on feedlot management. And the only thing I can figure is that it was talking about sexing the eye. I don't know. I mean, I really don't understand, or that it was just very long, and sometimes sites that are very text intensive get blocked. So while I've had many requests to whitelist particular domains, I've never had a request to make an unfiltered workstation available. People understand, I think, that filtering is a way to help us effectively select digital content that's appropriate for a public library setting. And it helps us enforce our acceptable use policies without undue interaction with our patrons. And people understand that the public computers have to be locked down in a number of ways. I can't be letting people save things on hard drives. But we do our best to make sure that the patrons go away with the information they need. And I think over time, we've built that trust in the communities, and it seems to be a non-issue, at least in my library. I wanted to share with you the resources I used in case you want to revisit any of this. On my home page, we have links we love over in the navigation bar, and it takes you to a collection of delicious links. And so if you look on there under internet.safety, I've documented all of the sites that I used in the research for this presentation. Does anybody have any questions? Yes? Like the sites where they'll put up music, and then you can... I'm sorry. The question was, what are peer-to-peer sites? And the truth is, I don't really know how they work, but I do know that that's the music pirating sites and things like that. Not like Facebook, no. Okay, what a peer-to-peer site is... What a peer-to-peer site is, is you have it on your computer. You use a program, and somebody else uses a similar program, and it pulls it from your computer to their computer. So you download your music onto your computer, you set it up on the right way, then someone else anywhere. And the really key thing being anyone who uses this, who can get this information, can now download what amounts to your song as many times as possible. So you paid for it once, and then a million people download your one that you paid for. Which is why the RIAA gets all twitchy. Personally, I think that they're pretty much just shooting themselves in the foot because they're ticking off people and making them do this even more because people get weird about it. But that's what a peer-to-peer site is. And I don't really want it going on at the library. Fair enough. We do have some questions from North Platt, actually. One kind of just broad question is, I guess just in light of this whole filtering thing, is should we put up a sign that says, ask me to turn off the filter to let people know that they can? What do we think about that? Michael's giving two thumbs up. Two thumbs up? That's a sign that says, ask me to turn off the filtering. People know. I guess the question is, do the patrons really know that they can ask? Well, in my library, I think patrons know that they can ask. It comes up with a message that says this content is being filtered and why, and it gives the domain, and they go to the front desk and say, I got this, and could you turn this off? And that's fine. I don't know. We have 13 convicted sexual offenders in our community, and they all use the library. And so, you know, I don't know that I really want to invite that, especially considering porn is considered protected language. You know, it's a free speech matter. Well, it depends on what you say. It would depend on where you were. And I think that, you know, there's, I think there was a recent incident in New York City where they have unfiltered access at the New York Public Library. It's a different community standard than it is in Holdridge. I just, I don't know. I don't know. I think it's really a local decision. Yeah, and it would depend on what you want to use as your reasoning. I was going to say, because SIPA says you can unfilter for legal purposes, and they actually say it has to be legal. So if someone wants to look at, says, I want you to please unfilter the site, and you look, and it says, and it's child pornography, well, you can say, no, that's illegal. That free speech, be damned, it's illegal. Child pornography. Yes, child, yes. The second question from Ms. Platt also, looking for just some input. Since we can't recommend a specific software, meaning last year we, what would you suggest as a process to review the options and make a choice? Like how do you pick which filtering software you want? You know, that depends so much on the size of your library, the size of your staff for managing the software. For me, having the server level filtering just made it, it's a non-issue. If I only had one or two public access computers, I think that things like cyber patrol, and there's something, cyber sitter, there's something like that that are like $20 a month. A lot of the filtering products are intended for home use, and so they're easy to use and all those things. It really depends on the library, the librarian, the number of workstations you've got to work on, and how much money you've got. The Clark Connect, although a lot of them aren't really that bad, mine is $100 a year, and that includes the firewall and the filtering, and so I figure that's a pretty good deal. However, it is Linux, so you have that little complication. It requires hardware into that little room. Nothing is a clear win, I don't think. Yes? So, they're not saying that there's always filtering software that is on the text? There is no really effective, we were talking about this a little earlier, there's really no product that is commercially available that I know of that filters on images very effectively. So what you have to do is use the filtering software. Some of them, they have gone out and checked these sites to find like what I was saying about a domain will be filtered, will be blocked because we know it's got stuff on it, or a certain URL will be blocked because it's been determined that it has those kind of images on it, so that's how it actually has to work. Not, oh, this is a bad picture, because yeah, there's nothing out there that's doing it very effectively yet. These filters are working on other information they know about the site, or they actually have people that go and look for the bad sites, and then put them on their blacklist for you. And you'll find, I went through a little bit of testing at one point, and you'll find that you'll, because they know about that flesh tone software, so you'll see black and white pictures that don't have any text that relates to the picture. And the other question is what is porn? The bare breast porn? Well, you know, not really, and not relatively speaking anyway. So it's complicated. Yes, ma'am? I have a question for Chris. I don't know about Google. Just the safe search? No, it's not. It needs to be an extra technology, like an extra filter that you've done. Yeah, just doing the thing on Google wouldn't cover it. I think that would be more like for home. Yes, you can set it up. The kids couldn't get to things. I hear music. Any other questions? Thanks very much. We do have a question from North Platte. It's not really for you, it's for us, I think. They want to know if the library commission can put together a list of software that librarians could look at and consider. Basically, just a list of here's all the kind of filters that are out there. I don't know, we'll talk about it. Here's your choices. We could do that, but what I've discovered is that if you go out and look for reviews, most of the reviews you see of this kind of software is for the home user. If you go to Consumer Reports, you're not going to get this Clark Connect, for instance, or WebSense, which runs at a server level, too. You're going to see these little home use things. It's a little difficult, I've discovered, to find really well done reviews of library-level products, but we will see what we can put together. Next up, we have George Manson who's going to show us a free... Free as you want it to be. ...way of doing filtering at your library that you might want to try out. Do you want the clicker or do you want to just use this? Oh, of course, fine. Just so everyone knows, I'm a pacer, so I'm going to get twitchy up here because I can't move that much. All right, well, my name is George Manson. I work at the WebRemire Library. I've been the director there for a number of years now. We have four...no, five. Five internet computers for public use, and then a couple more that we used in the back. Previously, to finding OpenDNS, we used Cybersitter, which did a pretty good job, except that it was a little overly sensitive in an awful lot of ways. For some reason, it wouldn't whitelist e-mail sites. No matter how many times you put it on the whitelist, Hotmail, Yahoo! Always got blocked, so you had to turn it off for anybody because if kids had an e-mail site, they wanted to get to their e-mail, you turned it off. It's like, okay, fine, why is it doing this? Your spam filter has something bad in it. Everyone's spam filter has something bad in it. There's nothing you can do about that. It worked fine. You'd go back, you'd turn it back on once they were done with their e-mail. Except for the one time when we forgot, they switched without asking, and a kid did a search for Hummers. And, yeah, his mom was like, oh, gee, sorry about that. So anyway, so after that, I got a little fed up with keyword filtering, ended up finding OpenDNS, which is actually a little different from the methods that were discussed earlier. It doesn't filter on the server side, and it doesn't filter on the client side. It filters using the domain name servers, which is how your browser finds the sites that are out on the Internet. So why OpenDNS? All right, it's free. Or very low cost. Basically, you can donate to it. If you donate, I think it's $5 a year. It unlocks some other features, which will tell you various things about what people are actually using it for. It doesn't tell you who, obviously. Just, oh, this many people are going to Facebook. There's a whole bunch of stuff. You can also turn off the statistics if you don't want them. But it can be implemented on every computer connected to your network. So whether you want it on the ones that everybody else comes in, brings with them, it's going to be there if you hook it up on the router. You can also hook it up individually on every computer, but it's a lot more work and pretty much unnecessary in my experience. You can customize it from any web browser. You just sign into the site, change however you want, and you're done. And it verges on stupid easy to do. You don't have to install anything on your computer. You don't have to update anything on your computer. You don't have to turn it on and off for people. You go on, you change it on their website and that's it. That's what you're doing. Once you've done one thing which I grant for me is a very, very, very simple thing to do. For anyone else, you can do it. I have absolutely no question that you can do this. This is not hard. It may be a little beyond what you're comfortable with, but you can do this. Okay. Now, will it work for you? Do you have broadband internet? Have a router that handles distributing it. It could be wireless or non-wireless, but you're probably wireless at this point. Get tired of keyword blocking programs that are too sensitive. All right. Now, let's get started. First, we go to opendns.com. Then, you click on the sign up. It's free button. You create your account just like you would pretty much anything else that you've done on the web. Then, you click router, if that's how you're doing it. Again, you can do it without it, but then you're on your own. I can't help you on that specifically unless you talk to me later. You click on router and then you click on what specific type of router you have. For the most part, that looks like that, but if you just get your router and you look at it, somewhere on there, it will have the information you need. So, at this point, every router is a little different. Exactly how you log on to it, exactly what you have to do to find it. But every single one of them that's on here, it tells you how to do it. So, once you find your router, you just follow the instructions. I'm pretty sure everyone here knows how to do that. So, if it's too much, you know, like, get in contact with me, that would be fine. Or probably, I think Michael can handle it. It really, it's within people's grasp. Then, you log in to your account, sign it up in the corner, and click settings. And I will admit, this is probably the point where it gets the most confusing on their website. Because you go in here and you have to click the... You have to click this. You have to click your little... God, my brain just dropped. Your IP address. I have gone around in circles on this site, trying to figure out how you get to the next point. Because it doesn't look like a link. Because it's your IP address. Once you figure out that you have to do that, you click on there, and it opens up all of your various and sundry things that you can do. I have mine set up custom. But you can have all or none of these done. If you set it at high, a huge number of these get checked. If you set it at low, it's like two or three things. But the big thing it does, and it's not even listed on there anymore, is phishing sites are automatically blocked if you sign up for open DNS. Even if you do nothing else, this provides you one more layer for your patrons to not get scammed on the internet. Even if you nothing else, it's like I don't want to filter. I don't want to do anything else. I would still encourage you to sign up for open DNS. Turn off everything on there. Because it will help your patrons who admittedly, the ones that are coming to the library, may not be the most internet savvy. Not to go to websites where it asks them for their personal information and then steals all their money. Nothing else. But you select the sites that you want to block. You wonder why it's not working? Presets are a good place to start. There we go. Then if you have something specific, you go in, somebody says, oh, this site for some reason is being blocked. The one downside of open DNS is that setting stuff on your black and white list is not immediate. There's no real way to turn it on and off. You can white list sites and you can black list sites. Then it will take a few minutes for it to go through because it has to propagate throughout the DNS servers that it's using so it knows you want this blocked or not. In the time I have used this, I have had one site that somebody wanted unblocked. I have had no sites that anybody wanted blocked. It doesn't get in the way. Most people don't even realize they're being filtered. But unlike some, it doesn't prevent you from seeing them in the search engine. If you type in playboy.com, it will pop up there. You click on it, a screen pops up. This site has been filtered. Open DNS, talk to the admin. If you have a reason why you think this should not be filtered. It's not preventing them from seeing the sites. It just prevents them from getting into them. At which point, if they can come up and they say, I really don't understand why this site is blocked, you can go in, you can look at it to the side. Is this a site that needs to be blocked? No? Yes? Well, there you go. And I was hoping, unfortunately, the setup of the thing did not allow for it. I was hoping to ask for a volunteer because I brought a router with me. I was going to have one of you help me set up a router to have open DNS on it. So you can see just how easy this actually is. But the presenting computer does not allow for such a thing at the moment. Michael told me no, and then he hit me with sticks. It was awful. So, rather, I still have the router. Instead of sending it home with a nice person who volunteered, we're going to have a drawing. Hopefully, someone who does not yet have a wireless router will be able to win this, and they will have one at their library because you really should have a wireless router in your library at this point. And I think that's it. I don't have a huge sweeping topic to talk about, so I don't know how I can go on for an hour or anything. That's okay. We have some questions. Oh, really? All right. I have a question. You would have to whitelist it? Okay, the question is, if the site is blocked and somebody wants it unblocked so you can look at it, how can you do that if it's blocked? The answer is you whitelist the site, you look at the site, it's inappropriate, you re-blacklist it, and then if it is appropriate, then you just leave it whitelisted. You can't temporarily unblock something. It's not that finessy, which is also its upside. If it was less so, it would tend to get in the way more often in my experience. All right. The question was, will this hit individual computers? You can set it up to hit individual computers. You would have to set it up on each individual computer or set up two different routers having one group of computers running off of one router and another group of computers running off the other one, and then you could have one filtered and one not filtered. There's lots of ways to do it. It gets more complicated than just set it up on your router, call it a day. I was going to say, isn't that how, Michael, you don't use this at home and you had it set up differently for your computers compared to the teenager in your house? Sorry. I think it just helped answer the question. At one point, yes, I was using this at home and I ended up... I only had, okay, six computers in my house. Anyways... I set it up on the teenager's computers to go through OpenDNS, and the adults' computers did not, so I didn't set up multiple routers in my house. That would be a little insane. So you can do it on a computer-by-computer basis if you have it or multiple routers if you're large enough to set up that. We have some questions from the remote sites too. Well, first question, any statistical reporting with this? I think you said there was... Yes, there is. You get a limited statistical report if you don't pay anything. You get a far more comprehensive one if you, like I said, I think it's $5 a year, or something that's the minimum or whatever it is they call that. Just one more from the outside too. Can this be layered? Meaning on one level on the router and one level on individual computers? Like that complex? Not as far as I know. You could probably find some really complicated way of setting it up where you have multiple IP addresses. But I wouldn't recommend it. It's not really for that. If you really, really need a computer which is heavily, heavily filtered and then you want everything else lightly filtered, at that point you're probably better off getting something else putting it on the computer and then having open DNS on everything else. It gets, again, more complicated. Oh, okay. Okay, so the question is could you set it up to run off of a server instead of a router? Yeah? Okay. If you are actually running your own DNS servers, I think that would sort of preclude using this. But... Okay, what we're talking about is you can either set it up so the DNS from an individual computer runs through open DNS, at which point that computer will be filtered by open DNS. Or you can set it up so the router filters all computers that connect through it. Because then everything goes through open DNS. If it went through the router and you had open DNS set up on there, both would be filtered. I kind of have a question which might lead to George or I answering. Is anybody not clear on what we're talking about when we even say DNS? I'm sure it's a lot of people. I'm getting some nods. Go ahead. The internet runs off of numbers, IP addresses. We humans run off of words. So when you type in Google.com, it gets translated into the IP address of the computer you're trying to get to. I'm kind of simplifying in here, but that's basically how it works. That's done by a DNS, a domain name server. Your ISP has a domain name server which you're running through to do that translation for you. It's completely transparent to you. By signing up and pointing to open DNS, you're using their domain name servers instead of your ISP's domain name servers, and they have this filtering technology built into their servers. So what you're doing is you're basically kind of running your connection through them, and that's where the filtering gets done based on the settings you set on your account on their service. But all that said, once it's done, you don't even know what's happening. Yeah, it's completely transparent. It just happens. You search something and you go there, and then either it gets filtered or not depending on what you search. Sure, if you have more than one router, you could have one set up with it and one set up without it. Again, I really have not had any problem with it getting in the way of things though. The big thing usually people run into is keyword filtering. You bang into it all the time because people search for something and a site happens to have something on it today or whatever, but because it's just blacklist. Now, the other thing is brand new content, if it's a brand new porn site, it will eventually show up right away. But they have people that are dedicated to finding this stuff, and the nice thing is that you don't have to update because it's handled elsewhere. They put it into theirs. You just don't have to worry about it. To a certain extent you do. You should always be paying attention, but other people are handling adding sites, categorizing them, and so on. Yes, sir? It might, but I've never had it happen, at least as far as I know. In a lot of ways it actually ends up faster than an awful lot of local ISPs. The question was, do we use individual fixed IPs for our workstations or just standard DHCP settings? Sorry. On ours it's just dynamically assigned. We don't have individual workstations assigned fixed addresses. We have five computers, so we don't have as much call for some of the... And also part of my goal when setting up all of our technology stuff was to have it be as much a computer died. We get a new computer, we put it in the place where the old computer was, do a few minor things, and it runs. Because I know that I'm not always going to be there, and a lot of people that would end up working at our library are not as likely to be able to fiddle with internal settings. And George, I'll add that actually how your workstations get their IP addresses completely irrelevant to this, because it's how your workstations are handling DNS, which is going to be separate from their IP addresses. That's the follow-up question. Well, you could still then set your router as the DNS server and then have the router's DNS settings be open DNS. You should be able to pass that through. And his question was if you set manual IP addresses, you generally then set manual DNS. Okay, we have some questions from the other locations. And also I just want to say the first question that George answered that Stan had over there was about if it would slow down the internet when you're using it. That's actually the same question that Northplet had. So the answer was you haven't experienced that. My experience is if anything, it's faster than an awful lot of local IP. She was wondering if the process itself would slow down internet response time because it was having to check these things. No. If you try it but don't like the service, how hard is it to turn it off and stop using it? Okay, so you reverse what you did in the first place and delete the DNS settings that you put in and then it goes away. That sounds pretty... Strictly speaking, I guess it's easier. You only have to hit one key in order to delete instead of multiple keys and then add it in. But yeah, that's not an issue. Okay, and then two questions. Actually, Norfolk and Scott's Bluffs seem to ask the same question which is for me, it's about SIPA compliance and e-rate. It says, don't you have to be able to turn the filter off all the way, not just unblock a site for SIPA? And then the other question is, will it work for SIPA? Which I think is just related. No, you don't have to disable the filter completely. SIPA actually just says that, and it was one of the slides that I showed up before the text of it, the administrator supervisor or person authorized may disable the technology protection measure concerned to enable access for bona fide research or other lawful purposes. That's all it says. It doesn't say turn off the entire thing specifically. It just says disable the measure. So it doesn't have to be... you turn off the entire filter when someone asks. You can go and just let them get to what they want to and that complies totally with SIPA. That's not a problem. So you could definitely use this for it. And one more question that is for you is actually an interesting question. If using this, does some search engine such as Google give you a preview of the website? Will OpenDNS block the preview? Let's see. That's what I said. I don't know. I have not noticed it doing that. So either it does do that, which has been preventing it from happening, or I haven't looked at it in that way. I will say that unless you click the search engine, that unless you click there's a filter image searches, it doesn't filter the images in the thumbnails. So if somebody searches for something dirty, you'll get all the dirty thumbnails that just when they click on that, it won't show up. It blocks that. You can click on filter image search and then you just can't get to it and it doesn't work at all. But if you are truly concerned about people seeing the little inch high thumbnails, then you can block that. Okay. Anything else? Before we do our drawing for someone to get a router? Sweet. This drawings for all four sites. Yeah, I'm going to do that. Somewhere over there is your bag. Oh, router. Okay. Similar to we have a George has his bag full of router stuff. I guess everything goes along with it. I have a little baggie here that has I put in the names of everyone attending not just here in Lincoln, but all four locations. So everybody who's on our registration list is eligible to get this. If you're not here in Lincoln, we'll send it to you, of course. And as George said, if you already have a wireless router and you don't really need another one, let us know and we'll pick a different name. We'll pick someone else's. This is not a great router. But it's free. It's a G router. So it is a okay router, but it's not an N router or a really new router because it's been cycled out of my personal collection of far too many wireless routers. We'll play with it maybe for something. This might be a good one to start experimenting on. And it will do the job. If you don't have wireless, this will do the job. So, all right. You're down there and find someone and see who we get. We got Norma Michaelman from Nancy Fawcett. Are you, I don't know where she's at. She's obviously not here. We're away from someone from Nancy Fawcett very yet. Anybody? She is here. All right, she's in Scott's Puff. Would you like the router, Nancy? We'll send it out to you. No problem. Pause, pause, pause, pause. Yes, in all caps. Nancy, you get a free router. Great. All right. Thank you very much, George. If you guys do any more questions about this, he's at Weber Meyer. You can call him there. He'll help you out with any of this.