RE: Question for Sept. 20: Librarians, what's going on?

[Rich Puchalsky <rpuchalsky@att.net>]

This question had three branches, directed to librarians, library users, and Federal/state/local government employees.  But there is another major data provider that seems to have been left out: environmental and other nonprofit groups that are not libraries.

Some nonprofit groups provide data to the public through both electronic and other means.  They often serve as pseudo-libraries by taking EPA information and redistributing it to the public.  RTK NET (www.rtk.net) has been doing this with electronic TRI data since the first year that TRI data was released, long before there was an EPA Web site.  Other notable environmental group sites that provide access to EPA data include EDF's Scorecard (www.scorecard.org) and Environmental Working Group's site (www.ewg.org).

OMB Watch, a nonprofit group that runs RTK NET, released a report in 1995 called "The Right Stuff" that described what kinds of information people looked for on RTK NET and what kinds of uses they made of it.  I encourage people to look through that report; it's on the Web at http://www.igc.org/alair/report.htm