I agree that the organizing vs information debate is old and that people need both. But there seems to be a presumption that environmental information will all be used by scattered individuals without anyone to help them. My point is that if people either form or join groups, they will usually achieve sufficient specialization within the group so that one group member will have above average library research skills.
I agree that EPA and librarians in general need to make information as easy to find and use as possible. It's easy to say that, and many people in this discussion have said it. But what does that mean in practise?
Well, most of the practical suggestions have focussed on EPA, or libraries in general, being some sort of mediator. Writing documents on how to have public input into the system, making information retrieval programs with lots of handy explanations and disclaimers, writing basic pamphlets, making the library be a neutral meeting ground, etc. I don't think that these are the most important things to do, in fact I think that they distract from the most basic thing that these entities really should be doing, which is releasing the information that they do have.
Let me get back to those pesticide health effects reports for a moment. What is more important to the public -- that EPA should spend lots of effort summarizing them in an easy to understand form that tells the public what EPA thinks they should know? Or releasing them to the public, and letting anyone who can understand them make their own interpretation? The first is helpful, but the second is critical. If the information were available to anyone, people like Sue Darcey would write about it, and then library researchers interested in pesticides would read Darcey's stuff, and they would in turn write things for the general public. I don't want public access to mean public access only to dumbed down information. Especially since "housewives", as Velma Smith said, can develop the ability to understand all of the raw data themselves if they feel that they need to.
In my own data access projects, I try to make the information understandable, but my first priority is to get it out the door and onto the Web quickly. All too often I see these competing priorities result in public information being long delayed or never released.
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