Interesting bit of information there Michaelangelica.
I did a bit of googling and found a few related articles and it seems a number of congressmen/senators are requesting the ending of this. Probably the most significant:
"In September, several House Democrats asked the Government Accountability Office to examine the library closures plan. A GAO spokesman confirmed that an investigation will be conducted, but could not say when the results would be available. "
Keep the E.P.A. Libraries Open - New York Times
Senators call for delay in closing EPA libraries (11/6/06)
There are some pretty good laws regarding the destruction of documents by government. But they are not air tight.
From what I read, it seems we may have lost some data that could be useful, but it also doesnt sound like there was a targeted effort to disrupt certain information to protect some particular interest (say a chemical corp). There is also the potential that much of the data tossed on the fed level is still available on the state level. Much of the information from our lawsuit was held by the MN Pollution Control Agency, who then sent copies of all this to the Feds, so I know of a few boxes of duplicate info right there.
For every one box of information from our lawsuit that we held personally, the MN PCA had two other boxes of equal size from the other entities in our lawsuit. It was an amazing amount of information, much of it duplicative.
I also worked with someone who came to our office after having put in many years at the MN PCA. We talked much about data management and I can say, from her comments about that office, is there is much duplicative data held in boxes for many years due to government policies on how long to keep data. It is amazing the amount of paper that one small office can pile up. I can only imagine the mess at such a large government entity.
Our own office was required to keep every piece of paper or microfilm everything sent in by one of our clients. Address changes, notes for copies of documents, every correspondence was required to be kept forever, until we updated our own data practices policy. Our upgraded computer system allowed much of this to be discarded because the database keeps everything entered into it, somewheres within. There was only 1 or 2 people in the office who had the ability to delete data that had been entered.
But that doesnt mean there shouldnt be a closer scrutiny to what is occuring in this particular branch of the government. I think I will write my congressman this weekend and let him know that I think he should join the list of congressmen calling for some oversight into the plans of the EPA.
Burning the libraries? What is all this about?
