Category Archives: Concerns

EPA guilty of unfair labor practices in library closures

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EPA LIBRARY CLOSURES HAMPERING AGENCY WORK, ARBITRATOR FINDS
EPA Guilty of Bad Faith and Unfair Labor Practice in Shutting Agency
Libraries

Washington, DC – A federal arbitrator has found the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency guilty of unfair labor practices and acting in bad
faith in its national series of library closures, according to a ruling
posted today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility
(PEER). EPA is ordered to bargain with affected public employee unions
before making any further changes in its library network.

During the past two years, EPA has closed or reduced access to much of
its network of libraries which serve both its own specialists and the
public. Altogether, access to EPA libraries in 23 states has been
completely lost, and several specialized collections have been
shuttered, including its headquarters library.

Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:45:19 -0500
From: Lynne E. Bradley lbradley@alawash.org
From: Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER)

For Immediate Release: Thursday, February 28, 2008
Contact: Carol Goldberg (202) 265-7337

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Can Google Spiders find EPA-archived Documents?

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Marydee Ojala. Information Today. Medford: Jul/Aug 2007. Vol. 24, Iss. 7; pg. 13, 1 pgs

To read all of her article, click here.

Mike Flynn, deputy director of the Office of Information Analysis & Access at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), was a guest at SLAs Public Policy Update session at the SLAAnnual Conference in June in Denver.

The following excerpt expresses a concern about the “accessibility”/”findability” of the EPA documents archived online:

“It’s a key strategy of the EPA, said Flynn, to put more documents relevant to the topic online. Will Google be able to find EPA-archived documents, or will they be protected by a robots. txt file? Flynn gamely admitted his ignorance about robots.txt files and thought Google could find EPA documents, but knowledgeable librarians in the audience were skeptical. Is EPA a closed system? Are there opportunities to work with U.N. initiatives to open up EPA information to the world? Flynn’s answers weren’t the epitome of clarity, although he opted for openness.”
– Marydee Ojala

Source: www.infotodayblog.com