The Supreme Court decided in favor of maintaining current pornography prevention laws in public libraries, in a decision announced June 23.
Libraries that receive federal funding, including public school libraries, are required through the Children's Internet Protection Act to implement anti-pornography programs to prevent child access to pornography.
The court said that the state interest in protecting children outweighs the right to access first-amendment protected content online.
Adults have the option to ask to have the filters disabled while they use the computers.
The American Library Association challenged the law because educational access is limited and pornography is not blocked effectively.
"Filters over block and under block, they eliminate legal and useful info and let through objectionable or illegal material," Clark said.
The ALA also claims children actually are not protected fully by the filtering programs.
"Parents believe they are protected by these filters when they are not," Clark said. "That is a key concern for us."
The government does not provide funds for the filtering programs.
According to Clark, libraries will be forced to find other means to deal with the lack of funding for filtering.
"Libraries may buy fewer books and offer fewer programs to install filters that do not work all that well and libraries may choose to forgo federal funding and will not buy the filters," she said.
In either case library users, particularly in more marginalized and impoverished areas of the country will be the big losers
ALA members claim the decision was not based on updated information.
"I was interested that in order to make his case, the chief justice had to go back to a book about libraries that was published in 1930, almost 75 years ago," said Judith Krug, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom at ALA.
University library administrators said they do not believe the Act will have an affect on University libraries.
"We are not a library system that serves the K-12 audience," said Charlotte Scott, University library director of communications and publications. "We're having our attorney review the following, but since our audience is academic, our understanding is that this ruling applies to libraries serving K-12."
University library administrators plan to discuss the decision with lawyers to ensure they stay with in legal parameters, Scott said.
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