Research Librarys To Close

[Dubh Aingeal]

In a move that has been termed 'positively Orwellian' by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility Executive Director Jeff Ruch, George W. Bush is ending public access to research materials at EPA regional libraries without Congressional consent. This all-out effort to impede research and public access is a loosely covert operation to close down 26 technical libraries under the guise of budgetary constraint. Scientists are protesting, but at least 15 of the libraries will be closed by Sept. 30, 2006.

[BrassFusion]

...the nut?

[Dubh Aingeal]

See, Bush positively does not want the American people to know about the real effects of global warming, mercury levels, air pollution, and any other topic, which if known about by the populous, would undeniably be dire for "Corporate America".

Each year, EPA’s libraries handle more than 134,000 research requests from its own scientific and enforcement staff. The memo states:

“If OECA is involved in a civil or criminal litigation and the judge asks for documentation, we can currently rely upon a library to locate the information and have it produced to a court house in a timely manner. Under the cuts called for in the plan, timeliness for such services is not addressed.”

Which means that by closing the larger libraries and only being able to rely on the smaller, less able to handle that kind of request flow. Means that more EPA related cases will probably get tossed out as they were unable to produce the required documents to prove their case.

[Troy Spiral (13)]

Read through there trying to find larger context type language, as just "its getting cut" didnt seem clear enough to me to be nesssiarly good or bad. (if you want smaller goverment something needs to be cut)

But this part is concerning:

“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.”