[SLA-SF] EPA Begins Closing Libraries Before Congress Acts on Plan

[annenb at hillbillyhermit.com]

Here's the latest on the EPA Library situation from a PEER press release.  
It is not looking good.

http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=731

EPA BEGINS CLOSING LIBRARIES BEFORE CONGRESS ACTS ON PLAN — End of Public 
Access to Technical Holdings as Original Collections Shuttered

Washington, DC —The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is moving ahead 
this summer to shut down libraries, end public access to research materials 
and box up unique collections on the assumption that Congress will not 
reverse President Bush’s proposed budget reductions, according to agency 
documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental 
Responsibility (PEER). At the same time, EPA’s own scientists are stepping 
up protests against closures on the grounds that it will make their work 
more difficult by impeding research, enforcement and emergency response 
capabilities. 

In an August 15, 2006 document entitled “EPA FY 2007 Library Plan,” agency 
management indicates that it will begin immediately implementing President 
Bush’s proposed budget cuts for the next fiscal year, which begins in 
October, without waiting for Congress to act. The memo describes what EPA 
terms “deaccessioning procedures” (defined as “the removal of library 
materials from the physical collection”) for its network of 26 technical 
libraries. Under the plan—

- Regional libraries, located in Chicago, Dallas and Kansas City, serving 15 
Midwestern and Southern states will be closed by September 30. Other 
regional library hours and services will be gradually reduced; 
- Public access to EPA libraries and collections will end as soon as 
possible; 
- As many as 80,000 original documents which are not electronically 
available will be boxed up (“put their collections into stasis,” in the 
words of the EPA memo) and shipped for eventual “digitizing.” 

EPA scientists represented by the American Federation of Government 
Employees (AFGE), the largest federal employee union, had previously sent 
a “Demand to Bargain” on the issue, but EPA managers dismissed that demand 
as premature. The August 15th EPA memo, however, shows that the union 
concern was far from premature. On August 16, the AFGE National Council of 
EPA Locals filed a formal grievance demanding that all library closures be 
put on hold until affected scientists can negotiate the matter as required 
in the collective bargaining agreement, writing: 

“After October 1, 2007, three Regions will no longer have a physical library 
at all. Library hours or core library services will be reduced in other 
Regions that keep their physical libraries open. Management has been 
insisting that it can effectively ‘do more with less,’ and continue to 
provide the same level of library services to all of EPA’s staff members 
despite the reduction in the number of library contractor staff. The Council 
is not convinced that this is the case.” 

“The central fiction is EPA’s promise to digitize its entire massive 
collection, making everything available online someday, without any 
dedicated funds amid sharply reduced budgets,” stated PEER Executive 
Director Jeff Ruch, noting EPA studies show the cuts will actually lose 
money due to additional professional staff time that will have to be spent 
tracking down research materials now assembled by the libraries. “The idea 
that library closures are a purely budgetary move is increasingly hard to 
swallow.”

A key tenet of the new plan is that all research requests will be centrally 
controlled. The plan calls for “discouraging establishment of divisional or 
branch mini-libraries” so that central staff can “have knowledge of [the] 
location” of all research materials. In a mass letter of protest signed this 
June by representatives for 10,000 EPA scientists and researchers, more than 
half the total agency workforce, employees contend that the library plan is 
designed to “suppress information on environmental and public health-related 
topics.”

“What is going on inside EPA is positively Orwellian,” concluded Ruch.