Library science and EPA partnership thrives at 50
The EPA Library in RTP is the only one of its 22 libraries staffed by a university and with an internship program.
The Environmental Protection Agency, created in 1970, was still fairly new when Edward Holley, dean of what was then called the UNC School of Library Science, got a request from Stanley Coerr of the EPA Office of Administration.
Would the school be interested in providing, under faculty supervision, library service to EPA researchers in the Research Triangle Park?
“The EPA was combining three libraries from the Southeast in RTP, the Nixon administration had placed a freeze on federal positions, and the only way he could see of getting the job done was to contract with an educational agency for the needed personnel,” recounted 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 the 50th anniversary of this unique program, which has provided funding and invaluable professional experience for hundreds of students and allowed the EPA-RTP library to provide the highest-level service to patrons.
The student experience
The EPA Library in the Research Triangle Park is the only one of the EPA’s 22 libraries staffed by a university and with an internship program. Originally, the internship program was open to students who had completed at least one semester. Their pay began at $4,500 for 12 months, and students rotated through a variety of duties.
Dav Robertson was one of the program’s first interns in 1974, supervising them the next year. In 1977, he became the library director at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in RTP in 1977. When he brought interns to the NIEHS library in 1985, Robertson said their arrival was “like a breath of fresh air,” according to a 1993 story in UNC Research’s Endeavors magazine.
Launching careers
In 2009, SILS student Laura Westmoreland (Gariepy) researched the EPA internship program for her master’s thesis. She reported that:
- Students who have participated in the program, regardless of the library/libraries in which they worked, generally indicate high levels of satisfaction.
- 95% of respondents went on to work in information/library science for at least some length of time after the conclusion of their internships, and 82% of respondents continue to work in them now.
- 67% of respondents indicated that they believe their internship had a strong or very strong impact on their overall careers.
Rebecca Carlson ’12 (MSLS) currently works as the Health Sciences librarian and liaison to the Eshelman School of Pharmacy at UNC-Chapel Hill. She worked as an EPA-RTP library intern (2011-12) and said the internship was foundational for her career. “I hadn’t considered working in STEM libraries before becoming an intern, but I saw at the EPA how librarians could have a direct impact on public health and environmental health. I am still using research tools I first learned as an intern and think highly of the program and my experience in it.”
EPA-RTP Library today
Today, the internship program continues to allow the library to be on the cutting edge of services.
Library staff and interns serve a patron base of around 3,000 EPA researchers. The primary focus of the collection is air pollution, and the library is a repository for air-related EPA documents. The library also provides electronic access to over 2,000 scientific journals.
Five permanent library staff members, all UNC SILS employees, train and mentor the interns.
“The association with UNC allows the library to benefit from interns with fresh ideas on new library trends,” said current library director Susan Forbes. “It’s an innovative way to get high-level information services informed by what students are learning in SILS.”
