Since my library’s online access was filtered by Bess (N2H2), I have had students and faculty both complaining about the material they have found blocked. Among them:--
- A faculty member teaching “Students and the Law” blocked from the American Bar Association’s site on juvenile law.
- Students doing research concerning Mountaineering, blocked from sites on avalanche prevention because they mentioned explosives
- My personal favorite: I was blocked from a bibliography on Mongol History.
Bess, mind you, is a dog, so I have accumulated such gems in a file called, "Stupid Bess Tricks."
MASL would like to open this compendium to the library community. Have you been blocked from a site for no good reason? Has your filter been capricious, silly, or downright WRONG? Send your examples to Gail Garthwait, Keeper of the MASL website at <Web Manager> and we will post them for the world to see!
We look forward to your participation. ~~ Gretchn Asam
My library catalog (L4U) is web-based. Our Foolproof Internet filter made it impossible to look up many topics, such as dolphins. Sort of defeats the purpose of an on-line catalog, no?
Marty Weaver, Lincolnville Central School Library
My favorite recent block (by Bess) is the NoveList site provided via the
Maine Libraries Databases. Bess blocks all the links to YA award winner
lists. Try it for yourself if you have Bess!
One of my constant arguments with N2H2 has been that it blocks content in
services that we pay to access based on key words. So, on EBSCO or
Newsbank we cannot do a search of "teens and pregnancy". We can do a
search using teen*, but not that dirty word - teens! I have emailed them
and spoken with my district computer coordinator about the problem of
blocking content for which we pay to access, to no avail. It is comparable
to having someone tear out articles from the magazines we subsrcibe to
because they contain a red-letter word, like teens!
Suzanne Hamilton
Library Media Specialist
Yarmouth High School
PS -- The computer coordinator has abandoned Bess, thank goodness! for a
less restrictive, but still arbitrary Sonic Wall. It blocks Salon.com and
the Onion, among other deeply offensive sites....
w
