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EPA Library Closures Hearing – The Scoop
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. Continue reading
House Hearing to Address EPA Library Closures Today!
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? Continue reading
EPA Guilty of “Bad Faith” in its Library Closures
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." Continue reading
A Wiki Grows at EPA
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.
Continue readingHelp Us Explore Findability Through Tagging!
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!
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