After Criticism, ALA Revises Libraries and Internet Toolkit

Staff -- Library Journal, 3/6/2000

The most dramatic statements about Internet filters -- that they "block an average of 21 percent, or one out of every five sites containing legal, useful information" -- have been revised and/or dropped from the American Library Association's Libraries and Internet Toolkit. A message from Linda Wallace, head of the Public Information Office, said that revisions had been made "to address the concerns expressed by David Burt" of Filtering Facts, who criticized the study ALA used. The flaws in the study -- which was based on using filters with all blocking categories enabled -- were first reported by LJDigital. The Toolkit now states that, "In a test of 200 web sites, four popular filters were found to block an average of 20 percent...containing legal, useful information." The author of the study, University of Pennsylvania graduate student Christopher Hunter, acknowledged to Burt that his results "shouldn't necessarily be generalized to the entire universe of web pages" but noted that the study Burt conducted for his expert testimony in the Loudoun County library litigation also suffered from not being a representative sample of the web.