EPA workshop

Yesterday, I went to a workshop at the Lewis and Clark Library System building (Edwardsville) about using the EPA website. I took my former practicum supervisor, Barb, and we met my former cataloging teacher, Lynn, for lunch because she works in that building. The two of them know each other from working at St. Louis Public Library some years ago--neither of them work there now. The library profession is a very small world....

Anyway, after a delightful lunch, I learned about EPA's website.

Here are three useful, and not particularly intuitive, tips:

1. The search engine works from the page you are on and "below." So, if you want to search the whole site, use the search from EPA's home page.


2. Recommended pages are selected by EPA librarians with assistance from other staff. About 15% of the pages at the EPA are "recommended" as being good general information on a topic for a general user. The Recommended Pages are used in two ways on the site:
   
   
   • They show up at the top when you drill down through the Browse EPA Topics feature.
   
   
   • The default search is of "selected pages"--those are the recommended ones. If you want to search the whole site, you need to change the drop down box in the advanced search screen to search all the pages.


3. The High School page under Educational Resources is attractive and well-organized. I might start there to help any patron explore an environmental issue from scratch.

And here's one cool feature:
Some of the tools under Where You Live get to nifty mapping applications, although it takes a bit of fiddling (just like some of the census maps I learned about in Government Publications last fall) to get the things to work. Try the Window to my Environment section and be sure to mess around with the check boxes on the left and redraw the map to see the features.

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