supposition.").


We acknowledge that some library staff will be uncomfortable
using the "tap-on-the-shoulder" method of enforcing the library's
policy against using Internet terminals to access obscenity and
child pornography. The Greenville County Library, for example,
experienced high turnover among library staff when staff were
required to enforce the library's Internet use policy through the
tap-on-the-shoulder technique. Given filters' inevitable
underblocking, however, even a library that uses filtering will
have to resort to a tap-on-the-shoulder method of enforcement,
where library staff observes a patron openly violating the
library's Internet use policy, by, for example, accessing
material that is obviously child pornography but that the
filtering software failed to block. Moreover, a library
employee's degree of comfort in using the tap-on-the-shoulder
method will vary from employee to employee, and there is no
evidence that it is impossible or prohibitively costly for public
libraries to hire at least some employees who are comfortable
enforcing the library's Internet use policy.
We also acknowledge that use of a tap on the shoulder
delegates to librarians substantial discretion to determine which
Web sites a patron may view. Nonetheless, we do not believe that
this putative "prior restraint" problem can be avoided through
the use of software filters, for they effectively delegate to the
filtering company the same unfettered discretion to determine
which Web sites a patron may view. Moreover, as noted above,
violations of a public library's Internet use policy may be
detected not only by direct observation, but also by reviewing