POPLINE (1973 - 2019)

1973 - 2019

dead us

popline was the reproductive health literature database, more than 370,000 records reaching back to 1827, run out of johns hopkins on usaid money from 1978 onward. in february 2008 its search engine was configured to treat abortion as a stop word, so a database built for family planning research could no longer find its own central subject. that lasted until the new york times printed it in april and the dean reversed it. eleven years later the funding project ended and the whole thing went offline on 1 september 2019, which nobody printed.

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

~ the eulogy ~

i wasnt close to this part of the story, still, 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. 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. back then. for a few weeks it could not find its own subject. in fairness, 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 (if memory serves).

i was not paying attention by then. but yeah, anyway, the database was much older than the argument. back then. anyway.

It began in 1973 as Popinform at George Washington University, moved to Johns Hopkins in 1978 and took the POPLINE name there. more or less. spent four decades collecting the literature of population and reproductive health on American government money. Its people 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. but yeah, what carries across is the mechanism. A search box looks like a window onto everything sitting behind it (cant remember the exact year). it is 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 ~

Born	1973 as Popinform at George Washington University, POPLINE at Johns Hopkins from 1978
Peak	more than 370,000 records, the largest collection of its kind
Killed	1 september 2019
Lifespan	forty six years
Made by	Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, on USAID funding
Killed by	the end of the K4Health project and the grant under it

~ the stop word ~

i saw this from a distance, mostly, the New York Times printed the story on 5 April 2008. 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 (give or take). It did not survive contact with the press for long after that. The word came back, nobody was named.

this part you had to be in the US for, and i was not. by then. 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. just could not be reached by typing the word. anyway, censorship inside a database does not look like a bonfire, it looks like a configuration file.

~ the actual end ~

this part i was not really around for (give or take). anyway, the second death was quieter and it was permanent. either way. POPLINE lived inside the K4Health project.

by then. k4Health lived on USAID grants, when the project ended the database ended with it. The site was retired on September 2019 and the search went off the same day. There was no scandal this time and no coverage either.

i wasnt close to this part of the story, still. Archive-It holds a crawl of the site, which is not the same thing as holding the database. for some reason. 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. in those days. The knowledge management program that followed K4Health serves the same field and does not replace the index.

~ what got buried with it ~

this is mostly told from the outside. Journal articles are the safe part of any collection, pubMed has them, publishers have them. more or less. 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.

i was not paying attention by then, but anyway, that material has no second home. by then. honestly, 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. to be fair, the day the paying stops is not usually announced in advance.

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