ALA versus censorship

The American Library Association (ALA) opposes book banning and censorship in any form, and supports librarians whenever they resist censorship in their libraries. Since our society is so diverse, libraries have a responsibility to provide materials that reflect the interests of all of their patrons.

Dingell Examining Closure of Hopkins Health Database

The chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee is investigating why a government-funded, reproductive health database operated by the Johns Hopkins University briefly blocked searches using the term abortion two weeks ago.

The POPLINE database is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and run by Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Bloomberg's dean ordered all searches restored after he learned that an administrator had made it difficult to find abortion-related scientific material on the POPLINE Web site. The restriction lasted several days.

"I am concerned that the restriction of certain search terms in the POPLINE database is an ideological decision and not in line with the spirit of free scientific inquiry intended by the creation of such a database," Rep. John D. Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, wrote in a letter yesterday to USAID's administrator.

The congressman requested the names of the officials who were involved in the decision to make abortion a "stop word" - one that a search engine will ignore.

More here.

U.S. Funded Health Search Engine Blocks 'Abortion'

By Sarah Lai Stirland April 03, 2008 5:55:57 PM
Categories: Censorship
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/a-government-fu.html

A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world's largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word "abortion," concealing nearly 25,000 search results.
Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It's funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the federal office in charge of providing foreign aid, including health care funding, to developing nations.
The massive database indexes a broad range of reproductive health literature, including titles like "Previous abortion and the risk of low birth weight and preterm births," and "Abortion in the United States:
Incidence and access to services, 2005."
But on Thursday, a search on "abortion" was producing only the message "No records found by latest query."
Stephen Goldstein, a spokesman for Johns Hopkins, said he wasn't aware of the censorship, and couldn't immediately comment.
Under a Reagan-era policy revived by President Bush in 2001, USAID denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform abortions, or that "actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations."
A librarian at the University of California at San Francisco noticed the new censorship on Monday, while carrying out a routine research request on behalf of academics and researchers at the university. The search term had functioned properly as of January.
Puzzled, she contacted the manager of the database, Johns Hopkins' Debbie Dickson, who replied in an April 1st e-mail that the university had recently begun blocking the search term because the database received federal funding.
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The complete article may be read at the URL above.

Critics Right and Left Protest Book Removals

The federal Bureau of Prisons is under pressure from members of Congress and religious groups to reverse its decision to purge the shelves of prison chapel libraries of all religious books and materials that are not on the bureau's lists of approved resources.

Outrage over the bureau's decision has come from both conservatives and liberals, who say it is inappropriate to limit inmates to a religious reading list determined by the government.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/us/21prison.html.