UPDATE 4/3: A response from the Dean of JHU Bloomberg School of Public Health. The term abortion will be added back to the regular database for easier searching.

Plenty has been written in the past day or so about some possibly disturbing changes to the POPLINE database. Are they permanent changes? Temporary glitch? Why was it done? Or, something larger and well, very upsetting (to put it mildly).

See: Why is a Government-Funded Reproductive Health Database Blocking Users from Searching for Abortion Articles?

See Also: LibrarianActivist.org

and many other blogs… just search using your favorite blog engine.

One thing we haven’t read is a response (assuming they have one) from the POPLINE database as the talk in the blogosphere continues to grow.

We have contacted the team and have been promised a response in the next several hours. When we have it (assuming we get one), we will post it here.

UPDATE: We have learned an official response from POPLINE/INFO Project will be coming tomorrow (Friday). It will be interesting to see what they have to say.

That said, it would have been much more useful (and fair?) if POPLINE would have posted their OFFICIAL explanation for these changes BEFORE going online with them. POPLINE should have realized that info pros and other users would discover this change and transmit the news in an expedited manner using listservs and weblogs. Precisely what has happened in the past day or two. Being out front with the info would have made POPLINE fair better in terms of public opinion, even if their reasons are, well, not what we want to hear.

UPDATE 2: We noticed that you can still find entries (nearly 25,000) that deal with abortion issues by entering =”abortion” in the why can’t the user simply enter the term like they can with other search terms? They appear to have kept the data in the database but made it harder to access. Trying to hide or better said, make it more of a challenge to locate, is not a good idea. It’s a terrible one. Why? Because the info will eventually be found and those making it more difficult to access look bad, reduce the value of their database, and more importantly, they aren’t serving the needs of their users in assisting them in accessing the information they need in a timely manner.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 12:57 am and is filed under Access to Information, Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.