On 11 July, 1996, State and Federal Attorneys-General met to consider as a basis for national legislation, a draft New South Wales bill. New South Wales imposes harsh criminal penalties for networked communications and publications deemed unsuitable for minors. That such publications are already available on the shelves of libraries, bookshops and newsagencies will not be a defence. The proposed legislation represents possible the most sign ificant challenge Australian libraries have faced.

There is no doubt that the Internet represents an, as yet largely untapped, opportunity for enhancement of traditional information access and services of public libraries. However, public c oncern about controversial materials on the Internet has the potential to limit the capacity of public libraries fully realise its benefits and force them to adopt a controversial role in partnership with legislation which has the same purpose - that of g uardian of public morals.

Censorship has not been a major issue for Australian public libraries for a considerable time. The experience of the current generation of librarians has been almost exclusively restricted to dealing with the occasional challenge to material already held. Challenges to access to materials in electronic form before these can be considered for 'acquisition'.

Decisions about selection are passing from librarians to others. The prospect of losing control over selection and client access in the electronic environment should prompt librarians to cr itically examine professional belief-systems and the extent to which practice supports or erodes these.

Although we are professionally obligated to defend access to information, practice in libraries continues to assert the authority of adults to control and dictate the way in which the next generation will think, and what their values, beliefs, opinions and point of view will be. Library practice thus complements and supports moves to censor electronic information and communication.

Singapore's Minister for Information and the Arts, and Health stated last year that Singapore practices active censorship "not because censorship can ever be 100 per cent effective, bu t because the act of censorship is itself symbolic and an affirmation ... of the values we hold as a community." Politicians in Australia have been neither as honest nor as realistic as George Yeo, and as a result, librarians will be vulnerable if ce nsorship of access from libraries breaks down, which means that it is librarians who will have to implement and maintain censoring systems. Increasingly, society is being encouraged to regard the absence of censorship as a system failure and to remove the person or technology responsible for this failure.

Censorship at source is unenforceable on a global scale and can by circumvented by anyone with minimal computer smarts.

Robotic filtering services which provide the capacity to censor the Internet on an individual basis supposedly allow the censoring of information based on the set of values of whoever contr ols the computer in question. Any library considering implementing an Internet filtering system should first run some favourite sites through the Black Thursday machine (http://www.hyperactive.net/censored/). This site demonstrates how indiscriminately filters work. I was astonished to find that words deemed grounds for blocking can be found within other words. Title, Saturday and submission all caused blocking of pages within the Queensland Department of Education Virtual  Library. The ALIAnet front page did not make it either. The words Association (North Americans can not spell) is the culprit, though the graphic including the word passes muster.

Other methods, such as blocking IP addresses, can be circumvented. The only real protection we can give provide is to give children a moral grounding and some common sense. Vicarious experi ence reduces the vulnerability of children.

The public library has a role in this and a responsibility to provide the opportunity to participate responsibly in the electronic arena which is vital for developing information literacy. Public concern about children seeing something 'nasty' over the should of an adult library user is not a justification for censorship but rather a cue for public librarians to recognise their obligation to provide physical environments which facilitate us er privacy or accessing electronic information, and to implement policies to maintain privacy if procedures such as signing up for use of databases or electronic access stations are necessary.

The ill-informed, techno-junkies, and some influential librarians have suggested that electronic access to information will make libraries obsolete. To summarise their arguments:

• All information on all subjects will be accessible by everyone everywhere 24 hours a day;
• Everyone will have the skills to use all of this information
• No one will need to maintain information/collections "just-in-case" because demand will indicate what is needed
• Libraries will cease to exist as physical entities.

Propaganda about controversial materials on the Internet may, in this regard, prove to be a back-handed boon for public libraries. The perception of many local government elected representatives and administrators is that the major role of the public library is to service the needs of children. If these needs cannot be satisfied via the Internet, the risk of the public library being see as a dispensable substitute for the Internet is reduced.

That censorship, which public libraries in Australia have largely avoided in their provision of traditional services, is both eroding their capacity to provide electronic services and yet m ay prove to be a protection against erosion of traditional services, is an indicator of the increasing ambiguity of the environment in which the profession must learn to operate courageously as well as effectively.