From san@nal.usda.gov Tue Jun 2 12:55:08 1998 Date: Tue, 2 Jun 1998 10:05:46 -0400 (EDT) From: "Andy Clark, SAN Coordinator" To: sanet-mg Subject: Preserving Ag Literature: NEH Phase II preservation project Thought you might be interested in this. Andy ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 2 Jun 1998 09:57:04 -0400 From: Susan Barnes To: san@nal.usda.gov Subject: NEH Phase II preservation project begins NEWS RELEASE June 1, 1998 Preserving Our Printed Agricultural Heritage: Phase II of a National Collaboration Libraries in fifteen states are now working to identify and preserve state and local historical literature about agricultural development and rural life covering 1820-1945. Since the nation was largely rural until after WWII, these publications contain information about a significant sector of U.S. history. This cooperative effort is preserving agrarian literature for future generations of scholars and farmers -- irreplaceable literature, much of it in a fragile, embrittled state. Phase I of this project began in 1996 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities -- funding which enabled eight states to work with panels of scholars to identify the highest priority literature for preservation about each state. The 1996 grant also included funding for four states to microfilm their most valuable titles. This spring, NEH awarded $908,800 to Phase II of the project, which allows the remaining participants to complete their filming and enables seven more states to begin. Part of the "National Preservation Program for Agricultural Literature" (commissioned by the U.S. Agricultural Information Network and published in 1993), both phases of the project are coordinated by Cornell University's Albert R. Mann Library. The literature of agriculture and rural life documents such historical forces as life on the plantation, the abolition of slavery, westward migration, sharecropping, the arrival of European and Asian immigrants, the use of migrant workers in agriculture, Native Americans overrun by land-hungry pioneers, and the clash of Anglo and Hispanic cultures in southwestern states. In preserving this literature, Phase I and Phase II of the project save a collection of resources most valuable to social, political, and economic historians. In addition, researchers looking for sustainable agriculture techniques find inspiration in this historic literature, which documents methods from the days before World-War II, after which use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers became commonplace. In Phase I of the project Alabama, New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were funded to identify and preserve their literature while California, Florida, Nebraska, and Texas received support to identify literature. In Phase II these latter four states will preserve their state and local agrarian literature; Phase II funding enables Hawaii and Montana to identify and preserve this most valuable rural literature while Arkansas, Arizona, Iowa, and Minnesota have received support to identify their publications. To identify the highest priority publications to be preserved, pertinent documents for each state are identified and then ranked by panels of scholars. These rankings provide priorities to insure that at least the top ranked 25% of publications can be preserved for each participating state. In order to be preserved for posterity, these publications are then microfilmed according to ANSI/AIIM standards and the technical microfilming guidelines in the RLG Preservation Microfilming Handbook. Records for each item will be contributed to the RLIN and OCLC national databases, with a master film negative sent to the National Agricultural Library for safekeeping. Each library will keep negatives of the publications they have microfilmed, as well as positive microfilm copies for local use and for interlibrary loan. Phase II of the project will begin officially at the American Library Association Annual Meeting in Washington, DC later this month. At that meeting, project Director Wallace C. Olsen (Senior Research Associate at Cornell University's Mann Library) will hold a workshop on identification and evaluation of the literature, and Ann Swartzell (Head of Preservation at Harvard University) will conduct a microfilming quality assurance workshop. A total of $1,750,000 has now been awarded by the NEH to preserve a variety of publications: agricultural and farm journals, histories, grant and agricultural society documents, natural histories, and records of rural growth and community development. Examples of items to be preserved at participating institutions include: --early publications from Franciscan missionaries who worked with Navajos and Apaches in Arizona during the 19th century, --publications such as "The Plight of the Share-Cropper" (by Norman Thomas) which reflect the difficulties of tenant farm life in Arkansas, --records of controversies over public land use, protection of endangered species, water rights, and agricultural labor in California, --documentation of cotton plantation/slave culture, rural black communities, and the draining of much of the Everglades in Florida, --descriptions of the growth of the Hawaiian sugar industry and its relation to the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 (opening the way for annexation by the U.S. in 1898), --early journals which promoted scientific agriculture, such as "Wallace's Farmer" in Iowa, --details of the period when Minneapolis produced more flour than any other city in the world as early milling companies such as General Mills and Pillsbury evolved into conglomerates, --contemporary information from the days of conflict between ranchers and homesteaders in Montana, --railroad pamphlets such as "Great Opportunities for Farmers, Businessmen, and Investors in Nebraska, Northwestern Kansas, and Eastern Colorado," which were designed to sell farmlands and to attract settlers to the new West, --contemporary accounts of the period when settlers from the north came to Texas looking for land, sparking cultural conflict which would eventually lead to revolution and the raising of the Lone Star flag over the Republic of Texas. Mann Library at Cornell University will coordinate and manage the effort under Project Director Wallace C. Olsen (607-255-8939). Of the Phase I participants, Alabama, New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have completed the preservation of their top priority state and local publications. Contact persons for the remaining ten participating institutions are: Doug Jones University of Arizona Library (520) 621-6394 dejones@bird.library.arizona.edu Michael J. Dabrishus University of Arkansas Libraries (501) 575-5576 mdabrish@saturn.uark.edu Norma Kobzina University of California, Berkeley (510) 643-6475 nkobzina@library.berkeley.edu Erich Kesse University of Florida Libraries (352) 392-0342 erikess@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu Lynn Davis University of Hawaii Library (808) 956-8539 ldavis@hawaii.edu Cynthia Dobson Iowa State University Libraries (515) 294-9697 cdobson@iastate.edu JoAnn DeVries University of Minnesota Libraries, St. Paul (612) 624-7446 j-devr@tc.umn.edu Jodee Kawasaki Montana State University Library (406) 994-2381 alijk@montana.edu Katherine Walter and Rebecca Bernthal University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries (402) 472-3939 kayw@unllib.unl.edu (402) 472-4404 rebecca@unllib.unl.edu Kathy Jackson Texas A&M University Libraries (409) 862-4235 kathy-jackson@tamu.edu To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with "unsubscribe sanet-mg". To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "subscribe sanet-mg-digest".