ed itoria I N o r any drop t o drink! There is no point in environmental information being available if users cannot apply it to their problems
I
nformation, like the Ancient Mariner’s salt water, is everywhere. But unless users of information become \ astly more sophisticated than they now appear t o be, the millions of bits of knowledge lying around on computer tapes or in scholarly journals will remain as unbeneficial to society as the salty ocean was to the Ancient Mariner. Such is the amorphous generality this observer brought away from the National Environmental Information Symposium, sponsored by EPA this September in Cincinnati. The purpose of the symposium organizers was admirable: to have the generators of environmental information tell users of that information where they should go to get hold of it, how much it costs, and what its main characteristics are. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that so many organizations generate environmental information without being aware of the existence of each other. It is quite apparent that existing sources of information have evolved to meet the needs of specific groups of individuals with certain characteristics in common. While these sources-be they scientific journals, abstracting publications, computer-based search systems, or whatever-probably serve the groups for which they were developed well enough, they obviously do not serve anyone else. Whether it is reasonable to expect them to do so was not a question that was specifically addressed during the symposium, but some pertinent observations were made nonetheless. What makes the environmental field so interesting, and different from most other fields of’ human endeavor that are basically technical in nature, is that a very wide spectrum of people is intensely interested in the information generated within it. This creates difficulties of at least two types: first, much original information, being in scientific (or sometimes legal) jargon, is not even in a language that the layman can understand. Second, and even more important,. much of the source information is not couched in terms
that the user can use directly to solve his problems. For example, a scientific data source such as Index Medicus or Chemical Abstracts certainly can put a searcher onto all published scientific work on the health effects of lead but it cannot directly answer the citizen’s question “Is airborne lead killing our schoolchildren ?” Likewise, no information system that we can visualize, and certainly none that exists, can gives an unambiguous answer to the question “Is Company X polluting Lake Erie ?” These are the sorts of question that a TV reporter or newspaperman, perhaps understandably, would like answered. Newsmen at the Cincinnati symposium seemed convinced that the huge mass of environmental information developed and stored over the years is quite useless-because it is useless to them. One of the home truths that occurred to this writer in the course of preparing a talk on primary scientific publications for t h e conference, was that the information that is most likely to be “correct,”-that is. where conclusions are supported by data and carefully constrained--is published in journals which very few people can understand. Conversely, information that is easily read and understood is likely to oversimplify or even falsify facts. The sad truth today is that almost anything can be published-if not in prestigious scientific journals, where all contributions are subject to rigorous review, then in one of a whole raft of publications with lesser standards. The burgeoning secondary publications industry, which thrives on large masses of data, will pick up the information irrespective of the scientific “stature” of the source and represent it as information that is as reliable (or unreliable) as anything else in its data base. The net effect is that interpretation is something that is going to be needed as never before.
Volume 6, Number 12, November 1972 961
