A campus security staff member escorted an unidentified man out of College Library Monday night after students say they saw him looking at a pornographic website and writing sexually-explicit statements in an online conversation.

According to a witness, the security staff member reported the incident to a library supervisor.

Library personnel declined to answer questions regarding the incident. UW-Madison senior Suchita Shah said she was studying in the library’s Open Book Café with a group of friends when she saw the man sitting at a computer around 11:15 p.m. Monday.

Shah said she believed the man to be between 50 and 60 years old, and called him “very unkempt.”

David Lapidus, a UW-Madison junior who was with Shah, said the man had a website open on his computer that looked like a MySpace page.

On the website, according to Lapidus and Shah, the man was looking at pictures of what appeared to be adolescent girls.

He had AOL Instant Messenger open on the computer as well.

The students reported the situation to the library’s front desk, and library personnel took the man’s information before escorting him from the library.

Shah said she and her friends found that the man’s AIM conversation was still up, and contained sexual innuendos.

Using the screen name “Jingo419,” he had been talking to a presumably underage girl, mentioning their age gap and the difficulty of telling the girl’s parents about their relationship.

Although the library staff do not check student IDs until midnight to enter the library, Shah said she was surprised that the man was able to login to a computer because he didn’t have a student ID.

At Memorial Library, security precautions were taken in the 1980s, after a man who became known as the “Library Stalker” attacked a woman.

According to Don Johnson, senior editor of external relations for UW-Madison libraries, Wisconsin has privacy statutes that prevent restricting access to computers, because the goal is to keep libraries easily accessible to students.

“We have to respect the academic atmosphere and the desire to be able to conduct research and to study without being made uncomfortable or having that work disrupted,” Johnson said.

He added that this incident is not to be taken lightly, but these situations are quite common in public libraries.

UWPD said it is investigating the situation.