No this isn't a news item from The Onion! It's Stephen Colbert's latest Wørd segment. In it, Colbert finds much to celebrate that our individual monetary value (IMV) as derived by government actuaries has declined by almost a million dollars -- a 12% drop in five years. And Colbert rightly points out that with IMV dropping, the cost of environmental regulations is higher than their benefits which causes IMV to drop even more in a "circle of life -- minus the life!"

Our report on our experiment in using del.icio.us to tag EPA documents originally harvested by GPO is now completed and available for your review and comment at http://freegovinfo.info/node/1825.

For more information about this project, including a list of tags assigned to documents by project participants, please see http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging.

Our thanks to the project participants!

Back in January we asked people to use del.icio.us to tag a sample of 32 documents taken from the 100 EPA documents posted by the Government Printing Office (GPO) to http://www.gpoaccess.gov/harvesting/index.html.
We asked people to tag documents from 1/18/2008 through /18/2008. A spreadsheet of the results is available at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pybymZBlZ80PVat2ggty2GA.
This brief article informally discusses some of our results, offers some lessons learned, and offers suggestions for future projects. Finally, a short list of articles on other research relating to tagging is presented.

1) Findings

• Number of tagged documents - 31
• Average number of people tagging a given document - 2.5
• Highest number of taggers for a document - 8, for the document "Environmental Results Under EPA Assistance Agreements"
• Average number of deduplicated tags per document - 11.25
• Number of documents with descriptions - 31, with a majority of documents having more than one human generated description.

2) Some Promising Results

While we would have liked to have seen more participation (see below under "study limitations"), these initial results are somewhat positive. There is some interest in tagging. Tagged documents tended to receive meaningful descriptions beyond what a brief bibliographic record would provide. For example, for the document "Air Sealing: Building Envelope Improvements", we have the following descriptions from five users:

* Mount Desert Spring Water was able to win a bid to provide bottled water and water coolers to the University of Maine. Mount Desert Spring Water was successful because the water coolers it provided were energy efficient and the lowest cost to the Universi - samchap

* Describes the benefits of proper air sealing for homes. EPA awards the EnergyStar when legal minimum standards are exceeded. - mkvs

* Conserving energy in your house by having it sealed correctly - bookswoman

* "Air sealing the building envelope is one of the most critical features of an energy efficient home." "25-40% of energy" "ENERGY STAR qualified homes, constructed to exceed [building] codes with air sealing, can offer a better quality product." - keyvowel

* This Energy Star news release describes ways homeowners can reduce home heating and cooling costs by implementing air sealing techniques. - tadamich

Without question, the first description is problematic, but the other four descriptions are in agreement about what this document is about AND provide more relevant information than a brief bibliographic record.

For the most part, the tags we got were also meaningful and descriptive. Staying with the document "Air Sealing", we have the following tags:

Air, air-sealing, airsealing, building-insulation, efficient, energy,
energy-efficiency, Energy-Star-Branding, energyconservation, energystar, epa, EPA-advertising, globalwarming, greenhousegases, home-building, home-building-techniques, home-construction, home-improvement, homes, hvac, indoor, leakage, money-saving, quality, sealing, ventilation

Contrast that with a brief bibliographic record that simply has title, agency, and URL. How would people know that this document is part of the EnergyStar initiative, or that it was related to home building or energy efficiency? Clearly, in this instance and in a number of other project documents, there was a clear value added.

3) Limitations of current study

Our promising results were limited by three factors, the most important was the lack of participation. We estimate that about ten people participated in our tagging project. The available research on tagging is pretty firm on stating that good social tagging requires many users. Some say 100 or so is good, others suggest higher numbers. Our numbers are clearly too low. There are also too many instances (12) when a document was tagged by a single user. This could greatly bias how a document gets tagged. Consider if the only description of "Air Sealing" had been the mistaken one about water coolers. That would have been worse than useless. But even in this instance, a user pulling up this document while searching for water coolers could have provided a more accurate description.

The low number of taggers also made it difficult to see how much tag agreement existed among the various taggers.

Another problem was self-inflicted. We forgot to instruct people on tag construction. These were our original instructions:

1) Visit http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=epapilotproject and go to a document on the list. Open the pdf file in a separate browser window.
2) In del.icio.us, tag the page for the Internet Archive record (i.e. not the PDF file) after examining the PDF file.
3) In the del.icio.us "notes" field, write a one or two sentence description of what the document is about.
4) In the tags field, please use epapilotproject, for:freegovinfo and then any tags that you feel describe this document.

del.icio.us uses a space separated tag system. In other words, a space begins a new tag. So tagging something as "air quality" results in the two tags of "air" and "quality" and not the more helpful tag of "air quality" This resulted in some of the tagging becoming meaningless. If we had asked people to put dots or dashes in multiple word tags, we would have gotten more meaningful tags. We still got some useful tags because some of our taggers were used to the del.icio.us system, but we shouldn't have assumed that everyone tagging would know how to construct multiword tags in del.icio.us. On the other hand, this problem might have been less noticeable if we had more taggers per document.

Our final problem is one we think could be avoided in future projects. That is people tagging different files with the same document title. We asked people to bookmark the Internet Archive page for a given document, which has a link to the PDF file. We specifically asked people NOT to tag the PDF file because del.icio.us doesn't populate the title field of bookmarked PDFs. But one person in our project consistently bookmarked a document's PDF file instead of the Internet Archive page and this separated that person's tagging from everyone else's and made it more difficult to compile tagging info for every document.

4) What next? Some suggestions

Our findings indicate that tagging does have potential to add value to web harvested documents that do not receive full cataloging, but for this benefit to be fully realized, there must be more taggers. When we realized we didn't have the number of taggers we wanted, we headed for the literature and found some articles
listed below under "References Consulted." They offer some interesting guidance for other document tagging efforts.

While all of the papers below talked about user motivation, I think Tim Spalding said it best in a post titled "When tags work and when they don't: Amazon and LibraryThing":

"Something is going on here—something with broad implications for tagging, classification and "Web 2.0" commerce. There are a couple of lessons, but the most important is this: Tagging works well when people tag "their" stuff, but it fails when they're asked to do it to "someone else's" stuff. You can't get your customers to organize your products, unless you give them a very good incentive. We all make our beds, but nobody volunteers to fluff pillows at the local Sheraton."

The EPA documents are sort of like fluffing pillows at the local Sheraton, to me at least. My primary interest isn't environmental documents and EPA documents are not a major component of my library's depository collection. In addition our particular sample was unintentionally heavy on flyers, applications, and brochures. It could be that another agency's documents, say NASA or DoD might get more attention.

There's another angle too. In my anecdotal experience, librarians don't see web stuff as theirs, so they don't spend much processing time on it. Of if they are concerned about web documents, perhaps their administration does not. So how could we make them owners and think of web harvested materials as "their stuff" so they'll make their "documents beds"? A few suggestions follow:

1) For the EPA documents, GPO could partner with libraries that do have a strong environmental collection. Perhaps candidate libraries could be determined through item selection analysis.

2) GPO might wish to consider doing a depository survey to see what agency depositories would most like to see web-harvested. The survey could include a question asking libraries if they would tag if the desired content was harvested.

There wouldn't have to be a commitment to tag every document, but to tag some of the documents.

While GPO should continue with web harvesting no matter what, we wouldn't blame them for not moving forward with a documents tagging initiative if the depository community failed to register interest in such a project.

3) If GPO re-harvests EPA or moves on to another agency, it should consider setting up RSS feeds for newly harvested documents. Subject specialists from inside and outside the library community could take part in tagging. Again, GPO would need to start with some broadly popular agencies to have a chance of recruiting a significant number of taggers.

4) If GPO or another organization does a large scale tagging project, significant thought should go into tagging conventions. Not the vocabulary itself -- research seems to show that once an item reaches 100 tags or so, the proportion of tags stays constant. That is to say that agreed upon terms appear to predominate over idiosyncratic or spam tags (See Golder and Huberman below for details). What needs to be spelled out is how multi-word tags should be constructed -- is it air-quality, air.quality, or air_quality? They all mean the same thing, but del.icio.us and other tagging services interpret them differently. A consistent new word marker or a choice of tagging site that supported spaces inside tags will make any tagging project go smoother.

These are our thoughts. What are yours? Look at our spreadsheet. Check out the item pages on del.icio.us and read the articles below. Then let us know what you think about the future of social tagging for government documents.

References Consulted

- "HT06, Tagging Paper, Taxonomy, Flickr, Academic Article, ToRead" by Cameron Marlow, Mor Naaman, danah boyd, Marc Davis http://www.danah.org/papers/Hypertext2006.pdf

- The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems
by Scott A. Golder and Bernardo A. Huberman
http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/tags/
http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/tags/tags.pdf

- "Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?" by Paul Heymann, Georgia Koutrika, and Hector Garcia-Molina
http://heymann.stanford.edu/improvewebsearch.html
http://dbpubs.stanford.edu/pub/showDoc.Fulltext?lang=en&doc=2008-2&format=pdf&compression=&name=2008-2.pdf

- "When tags work and when they don't: Amazon and LibraryThing"
Thingology Blog, posted by Tim Spalding Tuesday, February 20, 2007
http://www.librarything.com/thingology/2007/02/when-tags-works-and-when-...

Well...this is a good sign. The EPA wants to know "what kind of environmental information you need, and how you want to get it". It's part of the National Dialogue on Access to Environmental Information and the EPA wants your input. You can contribute to their discussion board or submit a comment. I'm forwarding this link along to the Environmental Sciences Dept. faculty here where I work, among others. Spread the word!

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) issued a press release analyzing the March 26 EPA Report to Congress. PEER Associate Director Carol Goldberg says, “EPA is approaching the task of restoring its libraries grudgingly and appears to be trying to get by doing the bare minimum,”

• EPA to Re-Open Libraries by Fall - But They Won't Be the Same, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, March 28, 2008.

The press release says that the EPA report makes clear that:

• Re-opened libraries would be limited to “core reference materials” and unspecified “resources to meet specific local needs.” The one exception is the Kansas City–based regional library whose collection had not yet been disbursed;
• All EPA libraries will be operated under the direct control of a political appointee who will review whether requests for research materials and services “meet Network standards.” ...
• EPA is not indicating when, how or with whom it will consult in order to determine “stakeholder needs” that are supposed to guide services.

The Special Library Association (SLA) announced today that EPA plans to re-establish the closed libraries by September 2008.

SLA met with EPA officials today to review the agency's report to Congress on the future direction of its library network.

The report, submitted to Congress yesterday, includes a summary of the network standards developed with respect to physical space, on-site collections, staffing and services of EPA’s Regional and Headquarters libraries, as well as a plan for allocating resources from the the 1 million dollars given to them by Congress:

•Re-establish on-site libraries in Region 5, 6, and 7, and the consolidated EPA Headquarters Repository and Chemical Library in DC.
•Enable Regional EPA libraries to update their collections, facilities, and equipment to meet Network standards.
•Conduct a formal needs assessment for EPA library services to support future development.

I am glad to see that EPA took the hearing's recommendations to meet with affected stakeholders and library organization officials seriously, but I do not think they met with anyone before the report to Congress was due, as was recommended at the hearing. At least, I have not heard or read about any such meeting. Correct me if I'm wrong. Nevertheless, EPA states:

"Over the next few months, we will continue to engage affected stakeholders (including our employee unions) as we finalize our specific plans for each library. The Agency is committed to working with its employees and outside parties on its future digitization plans (based on the third party review), a customer needs assessment, and long term strategic planning efforts".

Information Today published an article on the recent hearing and issues surrounding the EPA library closures that I've been blogging about this week: "EPA Library Closures: Management Incompetence or Something More Sinister?". I was hoping they would discuss or speculate what exactly the author deemed "sinister" but it's basically just an in-depth summary of the hearing and witness testimonies. Read between the lines?

I watched the live webcast of the EPA library closures hearing at the House Committee on Science and Technology's website this morning (the webcast was recored and is still available for viewing at their website). The opening and witness statements are now transcribed and posted as well. A summary of the hearing is described in the committee's press release.

Also, the GAO released a report of Witness John Stephenson's statement, entitled "EPA Needs to Follow Best Practices and Procedures When Reorganizing Its Library Network". This coincides with a February 2008 GAO report entitled "EPA Needs to Ensure That Best Practices and Procedures Are Followed When Making Further Changes to Its Library Network". The main recommendations from these reports include: the creation of a comprehensive plan to guide library re-organization; creation of an outreach process for garnering opinions and needs assessments of library users; create mechanisms to oversee and monitor impact; and develop procedures for the proper handling of materials.

Charles Orzehoskie, aka Chuck O, testified on behalf of the American Federation of Government Employees Council of EPA Locals #238. He declared that:
"The Council tried to work with EPA management but was stonewalled. Management was apparently not interested in what the Agency engineers, risk assessors, and scientists had to say about EPA libraries. The Administration’s action in shuttering EPA Libraries appears penny wise, pound foolish and a step backwards in protecting the environment. Unfortunately, so many of the Administrator’s decisions appear to be based on the President’s Management Agenda, and not on the mandates of Congress, the will of the American people or what would be in the best interest of accomplishing EPA’s mission".

Jim Rettig, ALA's President-elect, testified and focused on two points: 1) "the vital importance of access to scientific, environmental, legal, and other government information for EPA employees, scientists and the American public. 2) the necessity of the information specialist – the staff librarian – to ensure the most effective access to this information. Because there are fewer libraries and professional library staff, scientists and the public will have limited access to this
information".

The Q & A session after the witnesses read their statements was the most entertaining portion of the hearing. View the last 20 minutes or so of the webcast to see Chairman Bart Gordan questioning (with some truly great quips and jabs) Molly O'Neill, CIO of EPA. Ms. O'Neill was rather vague and unsure of herself when asked to give specifics, bearing an uncanny resemblance to a wide-eyed deer in headlights. Lots of: "We have not done X yet but we are committed to doing so" or "I'll have to get back to you" or "I can't answer that question for the record". She was unable to answer the question by the Chairman in regards to exactly who is authoring the report for the committees on appropriations, due on March 26th. Witnesses were surprised that they had not been contacted by EPA for commentary on the report, although Ms. O'Neill claimed EPA was "working closely" with the EPA libraries and those affected by the regional library closures.

In conclusion, the committee ordered that the witnesses' organizational representatives meet with Ms. O'Neill and her staff for consultation and to offer input and commentary on the report to congress before March 26th. Chairman Gordan also had Ms. O'Neill state for the record that closed EPA libraries would re-open before the end of the fiscal year.

The House Committee on Science and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight will hold a hearing: “EPA Library Closures: Better Access for a Broader Audience?" today (Thursday, March 13th) at 9:30 a.m. in Room 2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building. You can view the hearing from your computer via a live webcast. I'll be watching and blogging about it afterwards.

Jim Rettig, President-elect of ALA, will be a witness at the hearing.

The five key questions to be addressed, as indicated in the Hearing Charter, include:

Did EPA Have a Plan for Maintaining Continuity of Library Services When the Plan Was Implemented in 2006?
Did EPA Realize Budget Savings Through Implementation of Their Plan?
Has EPA’s Effort to Digitize Library Holdings Resulted in Greater Access to Library Collections?
Did Implementation of EPA’s Plan Ensure Continuity of Library Services to EPA Employees and the Public or Improve Library Services?
What Is The Path Forward?

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) announced that Federal Labor Relations Board Arbitrator George Edward Larney ruled that the EPA acted in bad faith when it abruptly ordered to close seven of its ten regional libraries during the past two years.

The arbitrator did not order EPA to re-open the closed libraries, because Congress already ordered them to restore the libraries in pg. 35 of a statement attached to FY 2008 budget (H.R. 2764) passed on December 26th, 2007.

Later this month, the EPA is supposed to report to Congress as to how and when it will reopen the libraries with the $3 million that was allocated for them to do so. Hopefully, the EPA will pay heed to the public's input (including the library and depository community) in regards to planning the restoration of these libraries.

PEER Associate Director Carol Goldberg echoes this sentiment, stating that "EPA employees are not the only ones negatively affected by library closures; the public now has a much harder time learning about toxic sites in their neighborhoods, the effects of new chemicals or even their local ecological history...while this ruling is a welcome development, EPA should not continue to shut the public – which is paying all the bills – out of the planning for restoration of these invaluable assets."

The February 4, 2008 issue of Government Computer News carries an interesting interview:

Molly O'Neill | EPA the Web 2.0 way
GCN Interview By Joab Jackson
http://www.gcn.com/print/27_3/45741-1.html?topic=&CMP=OTC-RSS

The article talks about some of the EPA's experiments with web 2.0 technologies including wikis. One of the wikis arose out of the Puget Sound Information Challenge:

So we decided to use the mashup camp as our staging area for the wiki. We had a form on the wiki site that you could download, fill out and send in. We also sent up an e-mail address and a phone number.

It was a little scary because we hadn’t told anyone about this beforehand. What if no one contributed? That wasn’t a problem — we had so many people interested and providing useful information.

We had people building applications. National librarians were culling data for library resources. We had people help organize it. The interesting thing was to watch how many hits we were getting through social networking. People took my e-mail and sent it to other people, who sent it off to even more people. We had a blog from Germany weigh in. We had over 17,000 page views and 175 good contributions.

We learned a lot, and we delivered something as well — in fact, several of us are going to Seattle to meet with the council to talk about these tools. They have to write a strategic plan, so maybe they could write a strategic plan with the wiki online. Instead of spending months trying to gather data, they could do it a lot faster using social networking.

Wikis are interesting animals as government documents. While they are very changable, wikis carry their own version control. Think about what implications that might have if you think a wiki is worth saving for preservation. Would you try to copy every version? Take a snapshot once a month? Or decide it was ephemera you didn't need? We'd like to know what you think. If you'd like to see EPA's Puget Sound wiki for yourself, please visit http://pugetsound.epageo.org/.

As a tool for quickly gathering community input, I think EPA is onto something. Especially if most contributers are identified. It would become easier to distinguish special interest group input from regular community input. Or at least the potential is there.

Aside from the wiki, the interview has a great insight from Ms. O'Neill that I think has relevancy to the library community. She is asked "Why do you think federal agencies have such a hard time disseminating information on the Web? " and the last part of her answer is:

But the third reason is that we tend to organize data in a way that it makes sense to us. Although this is changing a little bit now, at EPA we still primarily organize our data by how we are organized as an agency. People outside the agency don’t think of things that way. They get frustrated because they want all the information about a subject, like climate change or environmental indicators. So where do they go? We’re doing a lot to improve search on our site. When you do a search on the main page, it will give you folder options. When you type in “waste water,” it will organize by folder topics like stormwater or industrial effluent.

This is both warning and opportunity for libraries. The warning is that we also tend to organize data in a way that makes sense to us in databases (catalogs) that make sense to us but not to users. But the good news is that one of the ways we organize materials is by subject. And documents librarians are very good about searching across agency boundaries for materials. It's one of the many ways we add value to government information.

Free Government Information is investigating the usefulness of tagging government documents that do not receive traditional cataloging and needs your help! We've posted 32 documents that the Government Printing Office (GPO) harvested from the EPA web site and posted them to the Internet Archive. Over the next three months, we'd like to see as many people as possible tag and describe these documents using the del.icio.us bookmarking service. For a full project description and instructions on how to participate, please visit http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging. We'd like to thank GPO for posting a sample of their harvested EPA documents that made this project possible.

This project got its inspiration from Galaxy Zoo (http://www.galaxyzoo.org), an astronomy project which has a database of 1 million galaxies that researchers asked regular folks to classify as ellipical, clockwise spiral, or anticlockwise spiral. They aimed for and got at least 20 classifications per galaxy. If a particular galaxy was classified a certain way by 80% of users who assigned a classification to that galaxy, that classification was accepted. This "person on the street" data was compared with a small subset (50,000) of galaxies that professional astronomers had managed to classify on their own. The researchers found that there was pretty much total agreement between the professional and amateur assessments. Documents are more complex than galaxies. :-) , but if 9 out of 10 people tag an epa document as air quality, then it's probably about air quality.

So please visit http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging and get started. And tell your friends, coworkers and especially any environmental professionals that you know to get involved. Also, if you have a network in del.icio.us, we'd appreciate you putting on a "for:[friend name]" tag for every member of your del.icio.us network.

UPDATE 1/25/2008 Forgive my overzealousness with the above suggestion to tag every person in your del.icio.us network. I should never advocate spam. BUT, if there are people in your network interested in the environment or government documents, please consider sharing our project page with them.

The more people involved with this project, the better the descriptions and the more robust the subject access provided by the tagging will be. At least that's our hope.

We are going to run this project for three months, then the FGI volunteers will compile data on the following:

A) How many people participated in the project.
B) How many documents were tagged.
C) How many documents were described.
D) The average number of tags per document.

We will also examine how much agreement on tags exist for a given document. We will make our compilations publicly available along with any analysis we have.

Hope to see you on del.icio.us soon making environmental documents easier to find and easier to digest!

Recently, GPO released a sample of EPA documents that had been harvested from the EPA's website by software agents. These documents were gathered as a result of GPO's web harvesting project and a sample can now be found at: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/harvesting/index.html.

According to the EPA Web Harvesting page, documents are being made available in two ways:

The first method involves the creating of brief bibliographic records for the monographs and the CONSER standard record format for the serials. The majority of publications included in this sample will be made accessible through this method. Users may conduct a keyword search in the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) for the phrase “EPA pilot project” to review these cataloging records. The second method of access being tested involves posting a portion of the publications from the sample to GPO Access using a browse table. At the request of the Depository Library Council, LSCM is also trying to determine if there is a mechanism that enables public access to Web harvested content while these publications are in the queue for brief bibliographic records. LSCM has posted a small portion of the sample to GPO Access using a browse table.

If you want to see the full methodology and the documents available through the browse table, then please visit http://www.gpoaccess.gov/harvesting/index.html.

Regular readers of FGI know that we have problems with brief bibliographic records with no subject access, but we definitely appreciate GPO's efforts at item description and posting the browse table.

We are also very thankful to the Depository Library Council for requesting that the public be able to access harvested content while the publications are waiting for their brief records. We hope that GPO can find a way to accomodate their request as it will open up many possibilities for getting EPA publications in a timely yet searchable manner.

So thanks for sharing!

CONGRESS DIRECTS EPA TO RE-OPEN ITS LIBRARIES. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). December 21, 2007

Buried within the omnibus appropriations bill Congress sent this week to President Bush is a Christmas present for the beleaguered library network of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Congress ordered EPA to restore library services across the country and earmarked $3 million for that purpose...

The rationale for the library closures was never clearly spelled out by the agency, which maintained that it wanted to digitize all of its holdings. Its original claim of cost savings did not bear up under scrutiny and clashed with the enormous expense of digitizing hundreds of thousands of documents. In addition, the agency did not anticipated copyright restrictions, which barred many of its holdings from being digitized.

See more coverage of EPA libraries here.

Thanks to Bernadine Abbott Hoduski for passing along this press release from a federal employees group regarding the EPA Library controversy:

-----------------
Contact: Carol Goldberg (202) 265-7337
EPA LIBRARY SYSTEM CONTINUES TO IMPLODE
Union Charges EPA with Unfair Labor Practice for Refusing to Consult on Closures
Washington, DC — Despite public pledges of cooperation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is refusing to consult with its own employees about the effects of past or schedule of future library closures, according to an unfair labor practices complaint released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). In the face of growing congressional opposition, EPA continues to shutter libraries and make collections unavailable both to its own staff and the public.

The unfair labor practice complaint was filed on Monday, February 5, 2007 by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) National Council of EPA Locals, Council 238 before the Federal Labor Relations Authority. The complaint centers on the closure of the EPA Regional Library in Chicago and charges that EPA has refused to bargain on the impacts this action has on scientists and other specialists. The complaint asks for intervention to force EPA to enter binding arbitration on the subject.

"EPA touts its outreach efforts but has refused to consult with its own professionals or anyone else prior to hacking apart its library system," stated PEER Associate Director Carol Goldberg. "It is ridiculous that our nation's top environmental professionals have to wage legal battle just to keep access to information."

This Tuesday, in an oversight hearing before the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson testified that only five of the 26-library network had been closed. In fact, additional libraries have been shut, including, most recently the EPA Regional Library in Atlanta (serving eight southeastern states) where virtually all services had been transferred to Cincinnati. When confronted by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), the committee chair, Johnson said he knew nothing about this functional shuttering of the Atlanta facility.

The rationale for EPA's library shutdowns has shifted. Originally it was to save funds but agency studies show that its libraries produce cost savings several times their budgets by eliminating staff time that would otherwise be spent on tracking down documents. In addition, EPA's plan to digitize tens of thousands of documents will likely cost far more than the $1.5 million it estimated it might save.

Now, EPA claims that it wants to modernize its information system, even as its budget is being cut - the FY 08 proposed budget unveiled by President Bush this week would cut EPA's budget by 6.6%. The agency, however, has not described how the new system it is implementing on a piecemeal basis will ultimately function. Nor is it known how this still-developing new system will perform any better.

"EPA is forcing its entire staff to become their own librarians, wasting countless hours and sacrificing access to mountains of information formerly available," Goldberg continued. "These shuttered libraries handled tens of thousands of information requests each year, not the handful that EPA is now implying."

-----------------

More information and commentary can be found at the PEER website.

If EPA Officials authorized to speak on the record wish to comment on any of the claims above, especially:

"The rationale for EPA's library shutdowns has shifted. Originally it was to save funds but agency studies show that its libraries produce cost savings several times their budgets by eliminating staff time that would otherwise be spent on tracking down documents. In addition, EPA's plan to digitize tens of thousands of documents will likely cost far more than the $1.5 million it estimated it might save."

Please send an e-mail with a verifiable return address to admin AT freegovinfo.info and we will make an unedited blog posting out of your reply.