Health For Sex

Audacia Ray from Sex Work Awareness (and elsewhere) shared with me this smart and simple research project, funded by the Association for Progressive Communications. The project is attempting to get an idea of the state of access to sexuality information in U.S. public libraries. From the project website:

We are investigating the use of content filters on public library computers with Internet access. The priority research areas are access to information about sexuality and sexual reproductive health. We need help with this work, and request that people all over the United States visit their local public library and do some simple searches using the computers provided by the library. In places with filters, the items that are filtered are not standard across systems. Filtering today cannot be fine-tuned to exclude only pornographic or violent content rather than health information. For example, in a large east coast city, only the word “anal” seemed to be filtered, which prevented people from gaining access to information about anal cancer as well as any potential sexual content.

The site (linked below) includes an easy to use form that prompts you to run simple searches and document your results. Because the research site itself may be blocked (you can’t spell sex research without S-E-X) they also offer a word document you can print out or they’ll email you the form within the body of an email and you can open that up at the library. I live in Canada but travel to the U.S. all the time and I’m going to start making trips to public libraries wherever I go.

Check out the project and participate: Sexuality Information Access in U.S. Public Libraries

Sex and the Public Library originally appeared on About.com Sexuality on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 00:01:10.

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Sex and the Public Library