Making electronic info more available

[Tom.Hughes, Mass Environmental Library <Thomas.Hughes@state.ma.us>]

The web is a great tool for making information available.  As others have noted information provided in multiple formats is important. This is not just important for reading and printing the documents, but for finding them as well.  There is no one site, including EPA's, that can ever make everything available in so organized a fashion that everything can be found with a click. There are so many attempts to put it all together now, many of which are mentioned elsewhere in this dialogue.  All these separate clearinghouses are great, but you need to have an idea on where the answer is before you can find it.  In the end, we need to focus on finding the answer based on the question and not on where the answer is.  By making full documents or at least detailed summaries available in html, you make it easier for the researcher to find the answer through the use of a search engine that indexes the full text.  I continue to rely on a few search engines, primarily altavista, to locate information, and often find that the most difficult information to locate is available in Acrobat only.  For these docs, you have to hit the metadata terms find the answer.

The other part of this is making more info available electronically.  Especially older EPA publications.  We are always looking for older EPA publications that are still referenced and used, but not available in electronic format.