Distributing info local/regional

[Jeffrey Brown <globallearning@att.net>]

Introduction: I'm Jeff Brown, Executive Director of a nonprofit educational organization, Global Learning, that has been partnering with the American Library Association for the past two years in a project called, "Libraries Build Sustainable Communities."   I am not a librarian.

It seems to me that libraries and librarians do a great job responding to requests for information, so the person or group who knows what they want to learn more about can get quite a bit of information just by asking their local reference librarian for assistance.

The tricky issue involves the question: to what extent should public libraries provide information to people who may be affected by an environmental issue but don't know they are?  Librarians jealously guard their neutrality as a cardinal professional value and generally do not want to be viewed as advocates of anything much other than open access to information for everyone.

Public libraries also have spatial and budgetary constraints regarding what and how much they can house.  Obviously electronic forms of information become a tremendous resource.

However, the key is still the individual librarian who either knows about such information - and topics - or not.  I recommend that EPA provide extensive and ongoing education of public librarians re. types of information available, formats, updates etc.  Such ongoing training could take place at state, regional and national library association conferences, as well as in formal library and information science graduate programs.  Electronic networks of "graduates" would be relatively simple to maintain, especially since there's so much environmental information to process.

Librarians are information gatekeepers and turnkey public educators.  Once educated in the issues and trained in the technology they will each determine the extent of their pro-activity on environmental issues in their local communities.