Librarians' Forum

I would *love* for the New York Times to write an article about the whole abortion stopword issue - so who's contacting them? :)

I think you raise a good point, Kathleen - we do tend to just figure out the best workarounds when confronted with a roadblock. But in the environment of a reference interaction, this is not surprising - we have to be aware of the patron's needs, and generally the patron wants to get to the resources needed as soon as possible, and doesn't necessarily care about the steps taken to get there. So it's not surprising that we're not always thinking big picture.

Although in the long run, of course, it is in the patron's best interests that we actually improve the technologies we use so that patrons can use them more easily, too.

Just for the record, I'm glad I never had to fashion nested boolean searches in classic Mirlyn :)

I was surprised at how many times I saw the controversy mentioned over the weekend. I actually heard a story about it on my drive home Friday. It ended up getting picked up by A.P. and Wired News, and Ms. Magazine, and even the New York Times (they ran a story on Saturday). I would love to know how stories like these move into the mainstream media. There was apparently a message about it sent out to a few library listservs on Wednesday, I saw it on a library blog on Thursday evening, a few liberal blogs had picked it up by Friday morning and, by late Friday afternoon, it was on NPR.

I'm often guilty of just forgetting any problems I run into when helping a patron. I'm so focused on getting them the information they need, I don't take the time to report it when it happens. I don't want to interrupt the transaction to report it--usually the person is frustrated because of the roadblock, I don't want to make it worse by making them wait while I report it. I wish there was a button you could push on the MGetIt window when a link to the full-text doesn't work. That way, all the information about the article would be transmitted to the right person immediately. If we had something like that, I bet a lot more people would report the problems they encounter.

As librarians, we can sometimes be overly cautious about what is communicated to the public because we don't unnecessarily want to ruffle anyone's feathers. My first instinct was to confirm the POPLINE problem to make sure it wasn't an April's Fool Joke. I wondered if anyone would object if I posted it to the library blog, so I hesitated to post anything. I really had not heard much outrage from the librarians on campus. As librarians, we need to feel more empowered to make changes, speak up, and demand something better. To paraphrase the coffee talk, forget the ** patron when fighting evil.

There was an official statement from Johns Hopkins. It seems there were two article about abortion advocacy that started this chain of events. I hope the inquiry will uncover more of the details. Kudos to the ALA President Loriene Roy for her strong statement . I hope leaders from other associations like MLA and APHA will join in.

P.S. On Friday, I shared the news with the UM public health listserv after the official announcement came out. I pointed out it was a medical librarian who first noticed the problem and reminded our users to ask the library for help with their research. The post sparked some discussions and I received messages from people personally thanking me for keeping them informed. Make sure people know "Don't Mess With Librarians."

It's now also in the British Medical Journal. http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/336/7648/792-a.