Thursday, July 19, 2007

Does the EPA impact your business?

The Environmental Protection Agency has been fiddling with its libraries recently and now is about to do more, according to this press release from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing procedures that may lock away a large portion of its library collections from access by the public, according to agency documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Compounding the inaccessibility of physical collections, the public’s ability to electronically search digitized EPA holdings is problematic as well.

Over the past 18 months, EPA has closed large parts of its library network, including regional libraries serving 23 states, as well as its Headquarters Library and several technical libraries. The holdings from these shuttered facilities have been shipped to one of three “repositories” – located in Cincinnati, North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park and D.C. How the public, and even EPA’s own staff, access these growing repositories has been uncertain.

As I see it, this will not serve the public or the business community. What am I missing?