Yes, Virginia, censorship does still exist

While on the one hand I love to hear librarians in the news. It thrilled me to hear an interview with a librarian on NPR this morning until I realized why they were talking to a librarian. Recently, a large medical database decided that "abortion" would be a stop word. Essentially, this means that it stops the search from working. If you were to try and search for abortion in this database, you would retrieve nothing back. You might ask, "how can that be? Aren't there are a lot of scholarly, research articles about abortion?" The answer is yes, which is a big problem. In my mind, this is a perfect example of politics determining access to information, which should not be. If we allow these practices to continue, it could be as bad as the futuristic society found in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Luckily, the change to the database has been reversed, and the ever-previous access to information has been restored. But if it happened once, do we have to worry about it happening again? It could. Optimistically, I'd like to believe that it might not happen after a change in our administration, but that's just too Polly Anna-ish for me.

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