Why is the EPA's library being decimated?
- From: J Flenner <varney@[redacted]>
- Subject: Why is the EPA's library being decimated?
- Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 08:18:30 -0400
[]
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/home/52884/
March 2007 | The Scientist, Volume 21, Issue 3, Page 26
A Hostile Environment for Documents
Why is the EPA's library being decimated?
By Glenn McGee
Glenn McGee is the director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute at
Albany Medical College, where he holds the John A. Balint Endowed Chair
in Medical Ethics. gmcgee@[redacted]
Like most US agencies charged with the oversight of the public's health,
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) relies on accumulated wisdom
as it navigates new and varied problems. So imagine the information it
stores at 27 libraries: books, journals, reports, and documents
numbering in the millions. According to agency statistics, in 2005 EPA
library staff fielded more than 134,000 database and reference questions
and distributed tens of thousands of documents to researchers and the
public. The library is the institutional memory of the EPA.
Like most libraries, EPA libraries have not scanned most holdings into
electronic format. So librarians and location- or specialty-specific
repositories are important to the EPA and those who consume its
information. You'd think that the agency responsible for, say, all
clinical information on the effects of pesticides would do anything to
keep those systems of information fully operational and to modernize.
But in fact, the greatest environmental disaster of this decade may be
the amnesia that the White House and EPA seem hell-bent on causing.
(snip)
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