Ten days ago at the University of California in San Francisco, librarian Gloria Won was running through POPLINE (POPulation information onLINE), billed as "the world's largest database on reproductive health." Maintained by Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, and freely available to medical schools, health organizations and the public, it is funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Won was stymied. Entering the keyword "abortion," she kept getting the message "No records found." Odd, because she had done a similar search in January and found thousands of scholarly and peer-reviewed articles on the subject. When she emailed POPLINE, database manager Debra Dickson replied: "We recently made all abortion terms stop words."

Which means that, just like "the" and "and" and other words databases and browsers such as Google ignore, POPLINE would not recognize "abortion."

Because?

"As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now," explained Dickson, who suggested that Won search with "fertility control" or "postconception" instead.

George Orwell would have called this a "thoughtcrime."

ETA: Michael has informed us in the comments that the word has been restored as a search term. Whew!

- posted by Nels @ 1:13 PM | | | Link |