Introduction and comment

[Mary Musetti <musetm@jmusa.com>]

Hello, my name is Mary Musetti and I wear multiple hats.  During the day I am an Environmental Health and Safety Specialist for Johnson Matthey, a precious metals and chemicals manufacturer.  I am also an interested citizen and Girl Scout Leader.

I find the EPA web site easy to use and never have too much trouble navigating it. However, I am very familiar with EPA, their departments, and the functions of these departments. Without this knowledge it is difficult to navigate through the EPA website and perhaps a flow/org chart can be shown for people so that they have a general understanding of the departments and their functions.

Professionally, I am greatly interested in having all federal and state environmental regulations available. Also necessary are guidance documents and forms that are used to apply for permits, file regulatory reports etc. I have no problems finding federal information but not all states have their regulations and forms available.

Personally, I think libraries should be repositories of information for those persons who can not access the web via office or home. I also think that the message that libraries have this information needs to be better communicated. Most people are probably unaware that this access exists.

Finally, on the topic of children, environmental education, and libraries. The access of environmental information, or any government information, should be communicated to children in school. Most children have library and computer lab classes where the information can be communicated. I often find that teachers are unaware of the volumes of electronic information that is available to them. An effort should be made to tie the electronic information to the hands on information children receive in class.

For example. I have a Brownie and Junior Girl Scout Troop. Last fall we began work on the Water Drop Patch program, which is a watershed education program sponsored by both EPA and The Girl Scouts of the USA. I used the web to research all the educational material I needed for the program. To teach the girls about their local watershed, we had a two hour session in which we surfed a number of government and educational sites to learn about our watershed. We then applied that information using hands on experiments and activities from the web. It was a very sucessful program and the girls learned alot.