Archived UEN notice: Concerns about EBSCO Content
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20170307/http://www.uen.org/news/article.php?id=744
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Concerns about EBSCO Content
Utah organizations are aware of concerns.
The Utah State Library and the Utah Education and Telehealth Network are aware of concerns about potential inappropriate content in one of the online library databases we contract with for services. UETN and USL take these concerns seriously and have been in contact with the database vendor, who has assured us that they are working to resolve the issue.
Here is the response we received.
EBSCO Statement on Access to Age-Appropriate Content
On Wednesday, February 22nd, a press release was distributed from the National Center on Sexual Exploitation naming EBSCO to its 2017 Dirty Dozen. EBSCO Legal and Product Management teams reached out to the NCOSE and while we were not able to have them remove us from their list, they did add a caveat indicating that EBSCO had reached out and was working on solutions: www.endsexualexploitation.org/ebsco.
EBSCO has a long history of supporting libraries and increasing access to information as an aggregator of content. We take the need to provide age-appropriate content seriously and appreciate the families and groups that have brought these issues to light relative to EBSCO, ProQuest and Cengage content available in school libraries. In no way is EBSCO deliberately including materials that would be considered inappropriate, and we are increasing the level of scrutiny around how content is selected for databases and specifically those designed for use in K-12 schools.
EBSCO databases are often purchased at the state level and provided to a wide range of institutions that serve many age groups. The intent is for each institution to provide access to the appropriate databases. While EBSCO provides guidance as to which databases are appropriate for K-12 use, it is possible that a given school or district may expose the full suite of resources, unintentionally providing access to resources that may not be considered completely age-appropriate. In these cases, we are working with customers to switch to age-appropriate versions of databases as recommended. We are also allowing sites to leverage the tools that have been in place for decades to remove publications at their discretion so that they can access the value of the various resources, but with the comfort of knowing that the content is appropriate for each institution and its users.
We are working closely with our customers (schools and school districts) to evaluate these concerns and develop approaches where each school has a more granular level of control over content availability. We will introduce ways for each institution to make specific determinations about content not only at the publication level, but at an individual article level. The determination of what is appropriate and what is not appropriate may not be readily agreed upon across the groups of customers that we serve. As such, EBSCO wants to ensure that we do our due diligence initially, but also provide the tools that allow flexibility for customers to make additional decisions around content availability on their own.
Additionally, we have undertaken changes creating algorithms to identify and eliminate clearly objectionable articles and we are working with our content management team to create ways to deactivate links that are embedded in articles that link to inappropriate external content. We are working with our customers to better educate students and their families about internet safety and information literacy. Reloads that will remove inappropriate content have been fast tracked and we have created editorial policies to address content selection.
These are the key issues as we see it:
We were contacted about some parents’ concerns based on searches they did at home (beyond school filters) that led to sites, not in EBSCO databases.
These searches led to the material because the initial results from mainstream periodicals contained live links to third party content that led to questionable material. Additional searches led to information about books above the K-8 level because the wrong version of a databases was included on the school’s profile.
While we believe school filters would have prevented students from accessing these sites within the school environment, when we learned that searches that began in EBSCO databases could eventually lead to inappropriate web content, we began working to remove titles from databases that we considered non age-appropriate and we are working on ways to deactivate links in citations and metadata to provide libraries with more control. While we have always allowed sites to control access to individual titles based on their own criteria for what is appropriate, we are working on ways to allow those controls at the article level.
We are also working with the school district to make sure that, even though they had access to multiple databases from EBSCO through a statewide deal, they were only adding our recommended age-appropriate databases to their profiles (e.g. NoveList K-8 rather than NoveList) to further ensure appropriate access to information. Our Customer Satisfaction team can be leveraged to make sure schools are using the right databases and the right versions of databases.
We appreciate these concerns and are working to resolve the concerns or parents and libraries and will continue to respond to feedback from our customers.
End of EBSCO Statement
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