[Clipart] aggressive, potentially offensive language

Nathan Eady eady at galion.lib.oh.us
Wed Oct 5 12:42:14 PDT 2011


chovynz <chovynz at gmail.com> writes:

> What is OCAL's policies regarding swearing as titles on clipart?

If such a policy has been developed so far, I am not aware of it.  (That
doesn't mean we don't _need_ such a policy.  I'm just not sure it's come
up before.)

At minimum, anything with really nasty language in it needs to be
consistently tagged with a keyword (probably "profanity" or somesuch) so
people can easily filter them out.  The words "bigot" probably doesn't
qualify as profanity, and "filthy" certainly does not, but I saw at
least one that does.

There are also some (such as the aforementioned "bigot") that should
probably also have a keyword indicating that they are directed ad
hominem.  It's tempting to use the word "slander" as the keyword for
that, even though these titles are not slander (or libel for that
matter) in the technical legal sense, because it would probably
communicate better (to most folks) than "adhominem".  Thoughts?

I'm assuming here that the people being insulted are public figures
(ones I've never heard of, but that's not unusual since I don't watch
television) and that it thus qualifies as some kind of (inept and
markedly juvenile) social commentary.  If it's the artist's own personal
acquaintances being insulted, I'd be in favor of hiding them, on the
grounds that OCAL is not the proper venue for that.

I'm also assuming that the images themselves are original material.  If
they're existing OCAL images with new titles as the only contribution,
they're redundant and should be marked as duplicates and hidden.

-- 
Nathan Eady
Galion Public Library



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