******************************
John M. O'Sullivan
Farm Management & Marketing Specialist
Southern Region SARE PDP Management Team Member
North Carolina A&T State University
P.O. Box 21928
Greensboro NC 27455
tel (336) 334-7957
fax (336) 334-7207
email johno@aurora.ncat.edu
****************************
On Tue, 2 Jun 1998, Andy Clark, SAN Coordinator wrote:
> Thought you might be interested in this.
>
> Andy
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Tue, 2 Jun 1998 09:57:04 -0400
> From: Susan Barnes <sjb5@cornell.edu>
> 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
>
>
>
>
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