Public Internet Access in Libraries and Information Services

Citation

Calvert, P. (2002), "Public Internet Access in Libraries and Information Services", Online Information Review, Vol. 26 No. 4, pp. 280-281. https://doi.org/10.1108/oir.2002.26.4.280.4

The immediate popularity of public access Internet terminals in libraries is one of the success stories of the late 1990s. Most of us are directly involved with, or have seen in person, the huge demand for Internet access in public libraries, and in almost any library or information environment with a general clientele. The extent of this kind of service is now something we take for granted; on a recent visit to the UK I was both disappointed and actually very frustrated upon discovering that the public library of the town I was in did not have Internet access for the public.

Paul Sturges is Reader in Libraries in Social Development at Loughborough University and has written monographs on quite a wide range of topics. He has an easy writing style that lends itself to this sort of introductory management text.

There is nothing much here for people seeking information about the technology of providing public access Internet. After all, if there are no firewalls in the way, then it is all pretty straightforward. The difficulty lies in policy development for Internet access provision because “managing an interactive medium is an almost entirely new departure for information professionals”. The first point is that access to the Internet is really access to an entire medium and all its resources. Until now, information management has been designed for information scarcity and the harsh reality of providing information retrieval from a very limited range of items. The Internet is much larger than any library, and for the most part it is unsorted, not assessed and not monitored by quality controls. This requires a new approach to the management of this service. The second point that makes new approaches essential is the interactivity of the Internet. Trying to provide Internet access without including e‐mail is bound to be frustrated by services such as Yahoo!, so information managers might as well accept that customers will expect to use the Internet for communication and build that into their policies for use.

Sturges has covered difficult topics such as the ethics of access and the problems of filtering. There is clearly no simple “solution” to this issue, especially as its significance will vary enormously between countries such as Sweden and Malaysia. The book includes an extensive chapter on the law and the Internet, though the references are mainly of use within the UK. Practical matters such as staff training are covered, as are daily supervision, user education and monitoring. Probably the most crucial chapter is the one on making a policy for public Internet access, and in addition to the text there are several appendices that include codes of conduct, guidance documents, internal policy documents, public policy documents and Council of Europe guidelines. Again, this is of greatest use for UK readers, but as policy issues are more portable than the law, almost any information manager will find some help here.

To my knowledge this is the first monograph on this subject, and as such it is bound to find an audience. It is simple and to the point, and it includes many useful ideas and guidance.