Hurray for Librarians

I like being a librarian, I especially like being one when I read stories like this - Health Database Blocked Searches on 'Abortion' - and see that librarians have improved information access for researchers using the database POPLINE, a database of reproductive health literature from around the world.

For reasons that remain somewhat unclear to me, though it looks like someone was scared, the medical database POPLINE made the decision to set 'abortion' as a stop word sometime in February. A stop word is a term, like 'the,' 'of,' or 'a' that a search engine can be asked to ignore in order (usually) to increase the efficiency of a database search. Librarians took notice of the situation when searching the database and finding that searches on abortion topics brought up few or no results. After finding out about the move to make 'abortion' a stop word, they rallied fellow librarians and the media, and POPLINE subsequently made the decision to reinstate 'abortion' as a search term.

And shouldn't all of this mean that now, more than ever, Grey's Anatomy needs a medical librarian?

Women's History Month Databases

Alexander Street Press, who make some of the prettiest online resources around, provide free access to some fantastic Women's Studies databases during March. WSU will have access to the following until March 31st of 2007:

• British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries
  
• North American Women's Letters and Diaries
  
• Women and Social Movements

Questions? Contact Erica.

Thanks, Alexander Street Press!

Want to buy a cupcake? Want me to wash your car?

I'm thinking of the possibilities of library bake sales and car washes, a post-Midwinter state brought on by seeing all of these cool databases that I want. I've met one librarian in my lifetime who was satisfied with her collections budget. I find that I'm intensely jealous of her all the time.

After the Midwinter Conference, we get to look at some fabulous databases on a trial basis, and some of them would be very good for the teaching and research faculty we support. It's like window shopping for academic librarians, and it's fun.

It's also bittersweet, because with the exception of that nameless librarian who exists far, far away, very few librarians are satisfied with their collections budget. We want to give you more. More full text, more years of coverage, more images, audio files, and more coverage for more subjects. When your life's work is helping people access information, it seems as though you can never do enough to increase that access. And, very often, Libraries are not funded as they should be, and the people who work in them (and the faculty they support) are faced with decisions like these:

Database X is great and has lots of full-text coverage in this area where we do a lot of research, but to afford it, we'd need to give up database Y, which covers different publications and is highly useful for another area of research. Do we get X and let go of Y, or hang on to Y and hope that someday we can afford to get X.

So, perhaps double-chocolate cupcakes with dark chocolate icing? I thought so.