IMO the actual corresponsinding comparison would be that the library be able to purchase all the availabe physical items published, but instead, not choose to purchase those items that lie outside of their mission, collection development, and selection policies. Oh, wait, that’s what we already do. Because buying visually pornographic items is not within the mission of the public library.

And, please, don’t compare this to anatomy. I’m talking about stuff that you can *easily* find on the internet that would surely be X-rated. How many of those types of things do you have in your physical collections? Go to your collections and count how many X-rated (not R) DVDs / videos you have. How many subscriptions to adult magazines do you have?

None? Next to none? I thought so.

When you all have extensive collections of this in physical format (I’m not sure how accurate they are, but supposedly 10% of websites {not pages} are pornographic in nature), let me know. Until then, you are using a double standard.

And I’m willing to bet, that you will *never* have extensive physical collections of these items.

Because they are *not* within the mission of a public library.

The public gets this, but too many librarians don’t.

As to ‘scanning the collection for visual pornography’, are you using what I consider to be pornographic as the standard? The Miller test as the standard? I can’t even carry out what you ask since pornography is subjective; I think some of our romance novels would be considered pornographic by some observers. I presume you narrowed it to visual because of the internet, but people do write pornography as well online. There are erotic websites full of fantasies; should that be included as well?

If collection selection for physical objects is like drinking from a fire hose, then collection selection for the internet would be like drinking from a tsunami. It doesn’t scale up to the vast sprawl of the internet. To say that libraries could effectively carry out such a scheme is delusional and disservice to their community.