EPA closing research libraries
An article from Sunday on Salon.com reports on a relatively quiet decision to close the EPA’s 26 research libraries, with the promise of digitization of the contents for a less costly web distribution. However, as PEER alleges, the funds for this digitzation were never specified in the EPA budget. The seriousness of these allegations, if true, is really hard to overstate. The EPA libraries have an incredible amount of data that is not available anywhere else (as far as I’m available). In college, while researching on hill-farming (a long story), I found myself at the Region 1 library in Boston, puzzling through landslide data from soil-loss; Harvard had nothing comparable. It’s scary to think that this might just be lost. It started me thinking: how hard would it be for Google to just volunteer and digitize everything as a public service? This is at least something that can be done to undercut the Bush undercutting.
