NEW YORK TIMES
A. G. Sulzberger | March 26, 2011

As Wisconsin’s capital continued to echo with debate over the controversial legislation that strips public unions of collective bargaining rights, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison publicly joined the conversation last week with his first post on a new blog.

It was a lengthy and speculative examination of a national organization for conservative lawmakers that the professor, William Cronon, believed was partly responsible for what he described as “this explosion of radical conservative legislation.” The post soon received more than a half million hits, he said.

Two days later, on March 17, while attending a conference of historians, Professor Cronon learned that a public records request had been filed by a state Republican Party official demanding access to months of messages on his university e-mail account that referred to certain politicized words and names, including the governor and a number of legislators.

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Additional links, coverage, and opinions:
William Cronon’s original editorial:
www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/opinion/22cronon.html

Willian Cronon’s blog, Scholar as Citizen
Abusing Open Records to Attack Academic Freedom
http://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/24/open-records-attack-on-academic-freedom/

UW history prof targeted for records request by Republican Party
http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/govt-and-politics/article_54c271b2-56e6-11e0-b524-001cc4c002e0.html

Republicans target UW professor with open records request
http://badgerherald.com/news/2011/03/27/republicans_target_u.php

By Going After Prof., GOP Takes Aim At Wisconsin Tradition
www.channel3000.com/news/27337449/detail.html

A Shabby Crusade in Wisconsin (NYT Editorial)
www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/opinion/28mon3.html

American Thought Police (Paul Krugman, NYT)
www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/opinion/28krugman.html

Wisconsin-Madison to Release Professor’s E-Mails but Withhold Those Said to Be Private

IN THE LIBRARY WITH A LEADPIPE
Audrey Barbakoff and Ahniwa Ferrari | March 25, 2011

In the Library with the Lead Pipe welcomes Audrey Barbakoff, a librarian at the Milwaukee Public Library, and Ahniwa Ferrari, Virtual Experience Manager at the Pierce County Library System in Washington, for a point-counterpoint piece on filtering in libraries. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and are not endorsed by their employers. We thank them for their time and energy in writing this piece!

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EYEWITNESS NEWS Channel 3 | March 21, 2011

The state Department of Correction will review its library collections after learning that Steven Hayes, convicted in the 2007 Cheshire home invasion, read books in prison depicting violent murders and the burning of victims.

The new rules for Connecticut’s prison libraries will be in place around July 1.

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SPOKESMAN-REVIEW | March 16, 2011

Back in 2003, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Children’s Internet Protection Act, or CIPA, Chief Justice William Rehnquist took pains in his majority opinion to note that filtering online access for underage library patrons would not inconvenience adults. They could simply have a librarian unblock it.

Any First Amendment difficulties with the legislation, Rehnquist maintained, “are dispelled by the ease with which (adult) patrons may have the filtering software disabled.”

Idaho state Rep. Mack Shirley, R-Rexburg, feels no such qualms about safeguarding freedom of information. He is backing a bill that would require public libraries in the state to filter Internet access for everyone. Why? Because smut is all around us, and blotting it out is too urgent a task to be trusted to communities.

Granted, it’s well-established that the First Amendment does not protect pornography. But a problem arises when trying to strike the boundary between what’s porn and what’s permissible. Another Supreme Court justice, Potter Stewart, was quotable but not particularly helpful when he summed it up this way in a 1964 case: “I know it when I see it.”

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