Tennesse Schools Unblock LGBTQ Websites

In May, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Tennessee filed suit against the Knox County and Metro Nashville school district for blocking lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer websites.  Two weeks later, on June 3rd, the school districts announced that they would stop filtering the websites of gay-friendly advocacy groups such as the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) and Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG).  You can read the full article about the decision here.

A lot of schools and libraries filter their Internet to block explicit sexual or violent content.  In fact, post Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA) / and Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) legislation, many public libraries are required to use Internet filtering software if they want to receive funding from the federal E-Rate program.

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Electronic Health Records & Your Privacy

So this is what I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks instead of posting to my blog…  I’m trying to graduate from Library School (just two semesters left — halfway there!), and this is one of the projects I was working on this semester in my Information Policy class.

If you want to read about Obama, Britney Spears, Admiral John Poindexter, and the Department of Defense’s creepy plan to collect all kinds of data on you and then mine that data to predict whether or not you’re a terrorist, this is the article for you!  OK, so that’s kind of unfair — I really only mention Obama and Britney Spears in passing.  But I’m hoping its still an informative and entertaining piece on important things happening with your electronic health records RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE.

I am too bedraggled and brain-frozen right now to do any cool “click here to cut to the rest of the article” things, so for the time being it will just be a PDF: Your Liberty and Your Health: Protecting Electronic Health Records on the Nationwide Health Information Network.

More to come in the next few days:  a lovingly-written paper on Critical Information Literacy in Public Libraries (an issue near and dear to my heart), and a rundown of the Iowa Library Association’s Technology Petting Zoo, which is happening this Friday.

(*edit: my brain is working much better today.  Full text available below:)

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