Last fall, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began to close its nationwide network of scientific libraries, including some regional branch libraries and one at its Washington, D.C. headquarters. The agency was not only closing the facilities, but also had reportedly begun destroying documents or shipping them to repositories where they were uncataloged and inaccessible to EPA employees, scientists, and the general public.
In January, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson told Congress he was imposing a 90-day moratorium on closing additional libraries or disposing of reference materials. On February 6, 2007, Johnson testified before the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee that, “we are not closing any more libraries.” Nonetheless, an internal draft policy memo recently surfaced that seemed to indicate EPA was planning to renew destroying and dispersing documents from its libraries.