Coping with Environmental Information Resources

At a meeting on environmental literature held in Cincinnati in September 1972, it was reported that seventy-five government agencies put out reports in the environmental area. I knew I had trouble locating material. This figure gave me an idea why. There is no lack of literature available. The problem comes in trying to cope with it. Coping is the problem in many subject areas. There are three factors that make it particularly difficult to cope with environmental literature because of the nature of the field itself. First, environmental sciences is a new field; its boundaries are not yet clearly defined. It was only in 1965 that the heading "Man Influence on Nature" appeared in Readers' Guide.1 Before that, the emphasis had been on the influence of the environment on man, not the other way around. It was not until December 1970, that the Environmental Protection Agency was established to centralize in one agency the major federal pollution control programs formerly scattered in different departments. Scattering is the problem with the literature also. There are no comprehensive bibliographies of books, periodicals, reports, microforms, or audiovisual material. There are numerous partial bibliographies which must be located one by one. The need for coordination and cooperation in literature identification and exchange was one of the concerns of the United Nation's first Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in June 1972, and one of the concerns of the EPA's first National Environmental Information Symposium, held in Cincinnati in September 1972. The "first" in the titles of both conferences also points up the recency of concern in this area.published or submitted for publicatio