Jim Miller of the W3C described PICS, the Platform for Internet Content Selection. It was developed as a response to the Communications Decency Act, working on the assumption that free speech on the Internet is of paramount importance. Further information is available at http://www.w3.org/PICS/. PICS is a label, a controlled vocabulary. It can be applied within a document, can be integrated with the metadata, or can be produced by a third party (judgment as issued by libraries, Consumer reports and similar organizations, stock ratings). The intent is that it allows the user to select resources based on this rating. The question is whose labels are valued or respected? the author's? the publisher's? some outside agency's? It is hoped that this end-user empowerment will deflect attempts at censorship. The library can play a non-partisan classification role, but content providers must help and need effective tools. The values groups need to buy in.
Eric Miller of OCLC then described the work of the PICS Next Generation Working Group (PICS NG). It is hoped that PICS will grow into a general metadata syntax that will allow for more than mere filtering.
Paul Resnick from AT&T Research (soon to join faculty at University of Michigan school of information) discussed who should control the labels and how. Who will set the labeling criteria? America Online has labeling criteria that can be turned on or off. The labels can be applied at various levels, e.g. by IP address or by URL. Again, the issue of abuse of third-party labeling was discussed, with special problems for small and peripheral content providers. Resnick sees the best protection from censorship as a multitude of label sources. Singapore has a firewall for the country which does not use PICS. Resnick sees the public library's role as providing a selection of positive sites with the patron being allowed to set the filters.
Judith Krug of ALA discussed the importance of the parents' role in selection. The Office for Intellectual Freedom is vigorously opposed to the term labeling and sees a need to deal with filtering. Like circulation, information on filtering needs to be private. Particular situations were then described by three librarians. Dorothy Field, director of the Orange County Library System (Fla.), described their use of WebSense to block hard-core sex sites, implemented after they added public Internet access and discovered cases of hard-core watchers and enticement of children by adults. She maintained that they continued to be opposed to filtering on principle even though they felt the need to implement a block on hard-core sex materials. Frank Bridge described Austin Public Library's use of Cyberpatrol to label sites. Gordon Conable, director of libraries in Monroe, Michigan, also described their experiences with labeling services. He noted that Cyberpatrol blocks about 18,000 sites and sees the magnitude of analyzing web sites as incredible. AltaVista provides access to about 30 million sites. The end-user needs to be empowered to make selections.
An issue discussed by several speakers was the volatility of resources. Given the number of resources and their volatility, the reliability of any rating scheme is tenuous.