LIbrarians Raising Hell About EPA Plans To Shutter Libraries, Limit Data - SPI

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A national controversy over cutbacks and outright closings of Environmental Protection Agency libraries came to Seattle over the weekend as librarians from around the country told EPA officials the agency is undercutting its own workers, its scientists and the public. Across vast stretches of the heartland, EPA scientists, university researchers and others have scrambled to locate documents once easily found by librarians in the agency's regional headquarters, said participants in the America Library Association annual conference.

It's a development that critics fear could befall the Seattle EPA library, where hours of operation already have been reduced. With a congressional investigation pending, agency officials responded that they are merely trying to move the EPA libraries' contents onto the Internet, where people worldwide can use them more readily. But critics, including current and former EPA workers, say that's not how it's working out. Nearly all the documents not actually written by the EPA would not be put online, EPA officials told them, because of copyright restrictions. "Academic scientists are very unhappy with this," said Michelle McKnelly, a librarian at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.

Complaints at the library association's Saturday session at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center came mostly from librarians who work in a 15-state swath of the country stretching from Ohio and Minnesota to New Mexico and Louisiana. The three EPA regional libraries serving those states were shut down.

"When the Chicago (EPA library) closed we suddenly got an increase in inquiries from EPA employees," Aimee Quinn, who worked until recently at the University of Illinois-Chicago, told EPA officials. "The burden you put on my library was very difficult." Mike Flynn, director of the agency's Office of Information Analysis and Access said that the whole affair has caused misunderstanding of the agency's true aim: to make the EPA's information more widely available.

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http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/300615_epalibraries22.html