Science books and EPA cooperation succeed in 50 | UNC-Chapel Hill

The Environmental Protection Agency, created in 1970, was still new when Edward Holley, dean of what was then called the UNC School of Library Science, received a request from Stanley Coerr of the Office of Administration of the EPA.

Would the school be interested in providing library services under EPA supervision at Research Triangle Park?

“The EPA was consolidating three libraries from southeast RTP, the Nixon administration had blocked federal positions, and the only way he could see the work done was to contract with the Department of Education. for the necessary workers,” it said. Holley in The Galley, a student publication, in April 1989.

In 1974, the school contracted with the EPA to provide library services. This year, the UNC School of Information and Library Science marks 50 years of this unique program, which has provided funding and valuable professional experience for hundreds of students and allowed the EPA-RTP library to provide state-of-the-art service the highest for consumers.

Student experience

The EPA Library at the Research Triangle Park is the only one of EPA’s 22 libraries that has a university staff and training program. Initially, the internship program was open to students who completed at least one semester. Their salary started at $4,500 for 12 months, and students rotated through different jobs.

Dav Robertson was one of the program’s first students in 1974, supervising them the following year. In 1977, he became director of the library at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences at RTP in 1977. When he brought staff to the NIEHS library in 1985, Robertson said their arrival was it’s like a “breath of fresh air,” according to a 1993 story in UNC Research’s Endeavors magazine.

Starting jobs

In 2009, SILS student Laura Westmoreland (Gariepy) researched the EPA training program for her master’s thesis. He reported that:

• Students who participated in the program, regardless of the library(s) they worked in, generally showed high levels of satisfaction.
• 95% of respondents continued to work in information science/library science for at least some time after completing their training, and 82% of respondents continue to work in them now .
• 67% of respondents indicated that they believe their academic work has a strong or very strong influence on their overall career.

Rebecca Carlson ’12 (MSLS) currently works as a Health Sciences librarian and liaison to the Eshelman School of Pharmacy at UNC-Chapel Hill. He worked as an EPA-RTP librarian intern (2011-12) and said that research is the basis of his work. “I never thought about working in STEM libraries before I became a student, but I saw at the EPA how librarians can have a direct impact on public health and environmental health. I have been using the tools of doing the research I learned before as a student and thinking a lot about the program and my experience in it.”

EPA-RTP library today

Today, the internship program continues to allow the library to be at the forefront of services.

Librarians and interns serve a base of approximately 3,000 EPA research assistants. The collection’s primary focus is air pollution, and the library is a repository of EPA’s air-related documents. The library also provides electronic access to more than 2,000 scientific journals.

Five permanent librarians, all UNC SILS employees, train and deliver workshops.

“The partnership with UNC allows the library to benefit from students who have fresh ideas about new library practices,” said current library director Susan Forbes. “It’s a new way to make high-quality information services informed by what students learn at SILS.”

Read more about the SILS-EPA partnership.