Last Friday, The Dispatch’s cover story told how Lani Yoshimura,
Gilroy’s head librarian, has been honored with the with the Mover
of Mountains award. I read the article very attentively. Finally, I
spotted a veiled reference to Lani’s most significant achievement.
Library patron Dan Daniels said,
”
She’s… responsible for keeping this library an open
institution.
”
Last Friday, The Dispatch’s cover story told how Lani Yoshimura, Gilroy’s head librarian, has been honored with the with the Mover of Mountains award. I read the article very attentively. Finally, I spotted a veiled reference to Lani’s most significant achievement. Library patron Dan Daniels said, “She’s… responsible for keeping this library an open institution.”
No one would want to say in so many words that Lani was instrumental in keeping internet pornography available to children in the Gilroy Public Library, would they? Except me, I mean.
Not that Lani is unusual in her championship of porn for kids, or as she would prefer to state it: “Open access for all library patrons, regardless of age.” She simply parrots the straight line of the American Library Association.
Lani and the rest of the county library staff spent two years resisting all attempts by citizens to get the library to filter porn on library internet terminals.
When she spoke at meetings, she had three lines that she liked to repeat. The first was that a filter would block a chicken breast recipe. Even after we demonstrated that her assertion was untrue, the filtering software was sophisticated enough to distinguish between cookery, cancer, and XXX sites, she kept repeating it.
She also liked to tell of an outraged patron who wanted her to intervene on a pornographic site “and it was a cartoon!” I don’t know what cartoon Lani saw, but unfortunately, there are obscene cartoons. Some involve Disney characters: very eye-catching for a small child.
Finally she liked to state that the Gilroy Library serves a diverse population, which is true. We have families with children, and we have registered sex offenders. I happen to believe that the needs of families with children trump the desires of porn surfers.
Lani differed from her peers in the Santa Clara Library System in one regard. When we picketed in other cities, we were intrigued to note that in Campbell, Cupertino, Morgan Hill, and Los Altos every terminal was in full public view.
Lani was more concerned about privacy: she backed terminals up against walls and shelves, provided privacy screens, and bought terminals with deep wells for private viewing for the wheelchair bound.
After the JPA finally installed filters on the children’s side with optional filtering on the adult side, but with no requirement that children actually use a filtered terminal, Lani and I had one final interaction. On Oct. 26, 1998, I took my 11-year-old son to the library. Almost immediately he came to me, saying, “Mom, there’s a kid looking at pornography on the children’s side.”
I said, “Oh, Oliver. That can’t be. Those terminals are filtered.” He rolled his eyes at me and said, “See for yourself.”
As we all know, filters are not perfect. The child was viewing an obscene picture: obscene on two Miller counts, because it showed actual or simulated penetration AND the penis in an erect or turgid state.
I called the children’s librarian, Linda Glawatz, and told her, “The filter doesn’t seem to be working.” She assisted the boy in backing out of that site and finding what he said he wanted.
I was deeply upset, as you might imagine, though pleased that it had been handled at all. (Both in prior incidents and subsequent ones, complaining patrons have been told, “The child has a right to look at whatever he wants. Please respect the privacy of the child.”)
But later I had two questions. I wondered whether the filter had been disabled. And I wondered why, if it was operational, the children’s librarian had not immediately e-mailed the filtering company to report that an obscene site had not been blocked?
So the next week I returned to the library to ask Lani Yoshimura those questions. And she told me: first, that the filter had NOT been disabled, which was a big relief. Then, unsolicited, she told me that Linda had immediately turned off the machine, to erase the history, so that the URL was no longer available. Third, she told me that it was not library policy to inform the company of bad non-blocks.
That’s Lani’s legacy: don’t fix the problem, just hide the evidence. Congratulations.
