POPLINE

» see popline.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A stop word is a boring piece of search engineering. Every index keeps a list of terms too common to be worth storing, "the" and "of" and the rest of that family, and they get thrown out before anything is written to disk. Nobody notices, because nobody searches for "of". It is the least interesting decision in a retrieval system.

In February 2008 somebody at Johns Hopkins put the word "abortion" on that list. POPLINE was the largest bibliographic database in the world for family planning and reproductive health, more than 370,000 records reaching back to 1827, and for a few weeks it could not find its own subject. A medical librarian ran a search that had previously returned thousands of hits and got zero back. The staff answer was that the word had become a stop word. The reason underneath it was pressure from USAID, which paid for the database.

The database was much older than the argument. It began in 1973 as Popinform at George Washington University, moved to Johns Hopkins in 1978 and took the POPLINE name there, then spent four decades collecting the literature of population and reproductive health on American government money. Its users were researchers and health ministry staff in places where a journal subscription is not a realistic thing to have.

I have never opened POPLINE and had no reason to. It served a profession I am not in, paid for by a government I do not live under. What carries across is the mechanism. A search box looks like a window onto everything sitting behind it, and it is really a set of decisions somebody made about what the index is allowed to contain. You cannot see those decisions from the front. Twenty years of building systems has not made me better at spotting them from outside, only more certain that they are always there.

~ the dossier ~

~ the stop word ~

The New York Times printed the story on 5 April 2008. It did not survive contact with the press for long after that. Michael Klag, the dean of the Bloomberg School, ordered the restriction removed and stated publicly that the database was a resource for researchers and would be fully searchable again. The word came back. Nobody was named.

The detail worth keeping is how small the intervention was. Nothing was deleted. Every record about abortion stayed in POPLINE exactly where it had always been, and simply could not be reached by typing the word. Censorship inside a database does not look like a bonfire. It looks like a configuration file.

~ the actual end ~

The second death was quieter and it was permanent. POPLINE lived inside the K4Health project, and K4Health lived on USAID grants. When the project ended the database ended with it. The site was retired on 1 September 2019 and the search went off the same day. There was no scandal this time and no coverage either.

Archive-It holds a crawl of the site, which is not the same thing as holding the database. You can read the pages that happened to be public when the crawler came through. You cannot run a query across 370,000 records, and the query was the entire product. The knowledge management program that followed K4Health serves the same field and does not replace the index.

~ what got buried with it ~

Journal articles are the safe part of any collection. PubMed has them, publishers have them, and they are not going anywhere. POPLINE's real value was the other material: program evaluations and unpublished ministry reports, the working literature of health programs in countries that never get written up in journals.

That material has no second home. It was gathered once, by people whose job it was, on a grant that ran out. Anything held in exactly one place is held on the condition that somebody keeps paying for it, and the day the paying stops is not usually announced in advance.

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