The Environmental Protection Agency began an effort in 2006 to reorganize its library network. Now, more than two years past the initially-scheduled completion date, a Government Accountability Office report to Congress finds the EPA lacks a complete strategy for meeting users' needs and has no specific goals, timelines, or plan for acquiring, deploying and managing funding.

In 1971, the EPA created a library network which provided public access to environmental data, but materials and services were in varying formats and scattered geographically. Although EPA has made gains in digitizing library documents and consolidating libraries, it has not inventoried the network's holdings, says the report.

"Because EPA has not taken a complete inventory of its library holdings," wrote John Stephenson, director of Natural Resources and Environment at GAO, "it cannot determine which documents, or how many, will need to be digitized and, consequently, cannot accurately estimate the total cost of digitization or how long it will take."

Despite lacking an inventory, document digitization is in the second phase of three. The first produced 15,260 documents and was completed in January 2007. Phase two is scheduled for completion in December 2010 and is estimated to result in 10,000 electronic documents, and planning for the final phase is underway, according to the report.

The report recommends that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson direct the following agency actions:

• Craft a strategic plan, complete with goals and timelines;
• Take inventory of the library network's holdings;
• Digitize documents produced under existing assistance agreements and make them available to authorized users, for federal government purposes;
• Make explicit, for future assistance agreements, what EPA can include in the agency's public online database;
• EPA should digitize documents produced under the agreements and make them available for federal government purposes; and
• Conduct surveys of users' needs.

The agency concurred with GAO recommendations.

The results of the October 2009-September 2010 audit, which was not released publically until Nov. 1, drew data from EPA funding and inventory documents, policies, plans and guidance, as well as related regulations that might impact the improvement of library network operations.

For more:
- see the report, GAO-10-947 (.pdf)

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