My Taxpayer Dollars at Work

I admit that even though I've been on the guvmint dole for years, I sometimes question the real value of some government services.

Please don't send letter bombs, but even things like DOCLINE sometimes perplex me--why are the taxpayers paying for a separate ILL system for health sciences libraries? Why can't we (medical libraries and the base that supports us)fork out our $$ to OCLC like every other library in existence? Aren't there rules about government competing with private enterprise? And, please don't tell me that if we got rid of DOCLINE, we'd have to get rid of PubMed, too, because there's a viable public interest in maintaining PubMed. DOCLINE seems to be a holdover from a former age.

Ahh, but I digress from my intended topic.

While trying to determine the nutrient value of a baked potato, I wandered across the My Food Pyramid Tracker. Now, this is a nifty little tool! Enter a little personal information, what you've eaten, and your exercise, and get evaluations and recommendations six ways from Sunday. Since I'm under a mandate from my physican to get my cholesterol and blood pressure down (or she'll medicate me--at the age of 30--"Holy cow!" is all I can say to that), this seems like a fantastic little tool. It's an especially neat use of the data that the USDA already collects.

After a few minutes, though, I realized the planning and programming time that must have gone into this. How much is the My Food Pyramid Tracker costing the American public?

My next thought, though, was of the societal costs of diabetes, and I imagine that whatever the costs of the My Food Pyramid Tracker, it's TINY in comparison. If you've got the money and can pay for Weight Watchers or the WebMD online weight loss or other fee-based services, then you can access these kinds of resources. Why shouldn't they be available to everyone? Isn't there a vaible public interest in that, too?

Of course, we could get into all kinds of questions about the digital divide and the actual usefulness of online government information for the audiences intended to benefit from it. Those are important questions to ask, and it is a place where libraries, especially public libraries, can really make a tangible difference through computer access.

I also envision some kind of collaborative program between a hospital library and their diabetes care department. What an intriguing way to put this resource--and our tax dollars--to work, right where it matters.

BTW--for today, the food intake's pretty good. But it's only lunchtime, so who knows?