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

[Terry Link <link@mail.lib.msu.edu>]

This is a roundabout answer to Steve's question based on 20+ years of experience of answering reference questions.

I suggest that fundamental questions at the beginning of a research question are two:

Who is likely to produce relevant information? And where then will I look for it? A librarian's role is to help people answer Question #1, through a series of exchanges. I think people tend to answer this question too quickly, too often. This leads to time wasted going done the wrong road, or perhaps only looking down one road when two or three avenues should be checked.

EPA produces good quality information, by and large. But it's not at all clear to the average citizen(or librarian for that matter) when they are a good place to look for information. Sometimes the better place is industry or ngo's or scholarly research literature in a field or six. Skirting this question is not a good idea from my experience. EPA's recognition of this concept, might lead them to consider arranging links that would roughly categorize info by information producer type. There is something to be said for the subjective bias of any producer and this would help make that more apparent as someone is sifting through the weeds.

This leads me to another thought,the role of "relative risk". It would be good if EPA could consider aiming people to links of studies that might link the current info source to relative risk studies somewhat close in nature or in a larger sense, so they can begin to assess the importance of that which they have just read. I understand this would be
a major effort. But with all the divergent science, policy, and other writings out there the broader concept of "relative risk" might help add important context.