The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is closing its Midwest
Regional Library serving universities, the public and its own staff in
a six-state area, according to an internal email released today by
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). 
The agency is acting without waiting for Congress to approve the
proposed budget cuts that are the basis for dismantling EPA’s entire
library network.

In a March 13, 2006 memo to employees, EPA Midwestern Regional
Administrator Thomas Skinner wrote that “the library will close in the
near future” so as “to allow time for an orderly relocation of our
library collection.”  The affected library located in the Chicago
regional headquarters serves the six-state region of Illinois, Indiana,
Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.

The memo cites a 90% loss of funding for the regional library in
President Bush’s proposed 2007 budget as the reason for closing the
library, even though the proposal has yet to be voted on by Congress
and the new federal fiscal year does not begin until October 1,
2006.  The Midwest Regional Library is one of 27 libraries across
the country whose budget the administration has proposed to reduce by
80%.

“By putting its research collections into indefinite storage, EPA might
as well start burning books because these works are not likely to see
the light of day again,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch,
noting that the agency has allocated no money for moving collections to
other libraries or digitizing the holdings so that they would be
available online. “The loss of access to this research will remove
potentially key information from the hands of researchers, inspectors
and decision-makers.”  

The plan to slash library funding is among the $300 million in EPA
budget cuts proposed by the Bush administration.  As originally
proposed, the plan would also have de-funded the electronic catalog
maintained by the EPA Headquarters library.  When it was pointed
out that eliminating the electronic catalog would make it impossible to
find any holding within the network, EPA announced last week that it
would restore the $500,000 reduction to its headquarters for the
catalog.  Unfortunately, EPA indicated that it would compensate
for this action by spreading even deeper cuts cut among the other
libraries.

In his email, Regional Administrator Skinner pledged that limited
electronic access to research will remain available to EPA’s own staff
but it is unclear what happens to the tens of thousands of research
reports that are now only available as hard copies. At the same time,
employees in other EPA regions are reporting parallel scrambles to
cutback library services in anticipation of adoption of the agency’s FY
2007 budget.    

“EPA might want to wait for Congress to act before its shutters its
libraries,” Ruch added, noting that EPA spends more than a half-billion
dollars a year on research and the total library network budget is only
$2.5 million.  “EPA’s national research plan is supposed to build
on what we already know; but effectively deploying our existing
knowledge base will be increasingly difficult if decades of research
are locked away in storage.”

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Read the email announcing the library closure
http://www.peer.org/docs/epa/06_13_03_EPA_Library_email.pdf

Learn more about the Bush plan to close the EPA library network
http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=643

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