LISNews: Librarian News

This past week at Free Government Information (FGI)(http://freegovinfo.info ), we continue new poll looking into reasons why we have over 1500 daily visitors yet suffer a dearth of comments. Also this week, December BOTM Duane McCollum and the FGI volunteers posting the following stories: Duane's postings:

• Intute’s Tutorials
• Army's Total Force: Civilians and Contractors.

Volunteer postings:

• Help build a govdocs comics collection! - Daniel
• State Library 2.0 - Could depositories follow? - Daniel
• World Digital Library project - James A.
• Open source - James R.

If you use Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/) or some other RSS reader, consider subscribing to the FGI Feed at http://freegovinfo.info/blog/feed to get FGI stories as they are posted. 160 people already have.

The EPA story seems to be getting some traction, this time it's The LA Times. Officials say the cutbacks have been driven by tight budgets, declining patronage and rising demand for online services. And they say leaner operations will improve efficiency while maintaining essential functions. "We are trying to improve access and ... do more with a little less money," said Linda Travers, acting assistant administrator for the EPA's office of environmental information.

WASHINGTON - Concerned about the kinds of pollutants spilling into your local rivers and streams and how they could affect your health?

As the Environmental Protection Agency closes some scientific libraries around the country, EPA scientists and other environmental advocates worry whether that kind of information could become harder to find.

They fear that the agency's plan to save money by replacing printed resources with digitized versions on the Internet could make information less - not more - accessible. This information was reported by Boston Globe, Govexec.com and statesman.com .

Earth Times and Yahoo Finance report that the computer company SGI, SILICON GRAPHICS, IN (NasdaqCM:SGIC) has been chosen to digitize information previously stored in EPA libraries. Further research reveals that SGI filed for Chapter 11 in May of this year according to HPC Wire.

Fang-Face writes "An article titled Shutdown of EPA Libraries Worries Scientists, Advocates has been reposted at CommonDreams.org. It looks at how some academics and scientists view the closing. Best quote: Francesca Grifo, a botanist and the director of scientific integrity at the Union of Concerned Scientists : "Nobody is against modernization, but we don't see the digitization. We just see the libraries closing. We just see that public access has been cut off.""