Encyclopedia Brown And The Case Of The Missing Search Term

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health runs a website called “Popline.” The site is a publicly funded health database which provides information on family planning, patient care and health issues for women. Recently, librarians realized that if anyone searched for “abortion” on the site, the search was ignored. [CBS News] No one is quite sure what happened. Censorship, anyone?

Popline administrator Debra Dickson admitted as much, saying, “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.”

(For reference, a “Stop Word” is a word that is automatically ignored during searches, usually “the” or “an.”)

Best for whom, you ask? So did the Hopkins School of Health, which demanded the “stop word” be removed. Dean Dr. Michael Klag: “I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have directed that the POPLINE administrators restore ‘abortion’ as a search term immediately. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction.”

USAID officials, who fund the site, were “on a retreat” and unable to comment.

We love that librarians were the ones to bust this case wide open.

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