The medical librarian community has been buzzing for days about a discovery that POPLINE, a reproductive health site which bills itself as 'the world's largest bibliographic database on population, family planning, and related health issues' had made the term 'abortion' a stop word. For those of you unfamiliar with search jargon, a stop word is a word that is ignored by a search engine. They're normally common words such as 'a', 'an', and 'the'.
This upset virtually anyone concerned with censorship who heard about it, and POPLINE was suddenly facing the ire of librarians and researchers who contacted them, wrote in blogs, and publicised the move. Apparently this had effect; the dean of the school where it was developed has ordered it restored and is investigating why it happened in the first place. Now it's made it into the general media:
Web Site Restores "Abortion" Search Term: Reproductive Health Site Funded By Gov't Was Slammed For Restricting Use Of Word In Searches
When asked by one librarian why this happened, POPLINE administrator Debra L Dickson wrote: 'Yes, we did make a change to POPLINE. We recently made all abortion words stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.'
You see, POPLINE is funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Due to an order by President Bush resurrecting a Reagan-era practice, the agency 'denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations', as the article put it. This is effectively a gag order preventing federally-funded organisations from discussing abortion. Of course, by making it a stop word it meant throwing out 'spontaneous abortion' (miscarriage) and the alternatives suggested were too broad for meaningful results. So, it's good to see 'abortion' as a term back.
Yay for Dr Michael J Klag, who restored the term.
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