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WASHINGTON — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is closing libraries around the country, saying it wants to cut costs and make materials more accessible by moving them to the Internet.

But open-government advocates, lawmakers and EPA employees say the online effort will result in the opposite because the effort is poorly planned and underfunded.

The question is how much longer scientists, researchers and the general public can use the agency's library collections, which offer wide-ranging information about environmental hazards, contaminated drinking water and pollution.

Atlanta's library is fast becoming a rarity among the EPA's network of 10 regional libraries because it is still open. Its hours of operation will shrink by two hours per day to six hours.

Citing budget cuts, the EPA has already closed libraries in Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City and in Washington, D.C., as well as its principal library for evaluating new chemicals. It has severely shortened hours and curtailed public access at its five other regional libraries.

The agency says it has no plans to close its Atlanta regional library, which serves Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.

But EPA employees and watchdog groups are skeptical that the agency's library in Atlanta will remain untouched in the future.

An internal June 8 memo from Lyons Gray, the EPA's chief financial officer, to top agency officials indicates that the agency plans even deeper cuts next year, including at laboratories where much of the agency's research takes place. If labs are closing, employees say, everything is on the table.

In that memo, Gray wrote that the agency must "identify opportunities for consolidation and streamlining." That includes cutting the labs' costs by 20 percent over the next five years and closing an unspecified number of them.

"I think the level of cuts are really just a foretaste of what's to come," said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonpartisan environmental watchdog group based in Washington. "Everything is up for grabs. Atlanta could easily be on the chopping block."

The Bush administration wants to defang the EPA to benefit industry, which has long resisted the agency's pollution- reporting requirements, Ruch said.

"This is a slow-motion lobotomy of the agency," Ruch said.

The EPA disagrees. It says it is replacing the libraries with the Internet. The agency plans to digitize its collection, making it ultimately more accessible to scientists and the public.

The agency also hopes to shave $2 million off its annual $6.5 million library budget by closing some of its libraries.

But the agency has yet to detail how it will pay for digitizing its vast collection of 504,000 books and reports; 3,500 journal titles; 25,000 maps and 3.6 million items on microfilm. It has not addressed how it will post materials protected by copyrights. And it has yet to offer quality assurances that the material will be properly indexed, cross-referenced and archived.