School of Information and Library Sciences celebrates 50-year partnership with the EPA

In 1974, UNC entered into a contract with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, promising to staff their operations after a government hiring freeze. This year, the program is celebrating its 50th anniversary.

Gary Marchionini, former dean of the UNC School of Information and Library Sciences and current Cary C. Boshamer distinguished professor, said the partnership was formed from a five-year contract, which SILS has successfully bid on and won 10 times — the entire span of the program's existence.

The contract also supports an internship between the EPA’s Research Triangle Park Library and multiple graduate students at SILS, usually consisting of 8-12 students.

Although SILS continues to win the EPA contract, it is not without careful preparation. SILS prepares its bid over the course of a year and is attentive to details of the program’s parameters and the services that must be provided.

“There's no other schools in the country to have a program like this,” Marchionini said. “It's actually, I think, one of the reasons we were always in the top one, two or three rankings in the country, in [national SILS programs] because people know that our students are getting this extraordinary training opportunity.”

He said that under the contract, the EPA provides SILS with money to operate and staff the RTP library with five full-time contracted employees along with yearly interns. The last contract provided SILS with about $20-22 million, with $2-3 million going toward staff pay over the five years.

“Most of that money goes for the subscriptions, for the databases and journals that the library buys," Marchionini said. "So it's not just the actual human talent."

Interns apply and undergo a virtual interviewing process. If selected, they are contracted for an entire calendar year, beginning in August. 

Current EPA cataloging intern Ashley Cavuto said the ideal schedule is four hours a day, five days a week. However, since the interns are also students, she said it doesn't always line up that way.

Interns work six different rotations including Interlibrary Loan, Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards, Reference, Advanced Reference, E-Resources and Cataloging. 

Taylor Johnson, library assistant director at the EPA and a UNC contractor for the EPA, said that the partnership’s mission has remained largely the same over the past 50 years.

“We're still here to connect the researchers with information so that they can spend their time using it instead of trying to track it down, but I think that the technology and the tools in the library and information science world have evolved,” she said. 

Joyce Ogburn, an adjunct professor at SILS and a 1981 EPA intern alumna, said she remembered how she used punching cards, monochrome monitors and Wang computers at the EPA library. 

The data used by EPA researchers and SILS interns has evolved alongside their tools. Around 10 years ago, the library staff noticed an increasing demand for researcher’s citation information, also known as bibliometrics, and began to incorporate it into their programs.

“They can demonstrate the impact that their research is having on the scientific community, looking at the reach, the relevance [and] the response,” Johnson said. 

Johnson said the partnership between the University and the EPA provides researchers with personalized assistance and SILS graduate students with the opportunity to work with scientists on projects that impact real-world policies.

“That’s why I chose UNC for my graduate education,” she said. “Because I knew that this internship opportunity would be available to me.”

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