Mann efforts preserve agricultural literature on microfilm and Web

By Susan Lang

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded $618,857 to Cornell's Albert R. Mann Library to preserve local and state agricultural literature on microfilm. The library also is relaunching the Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) Web site to make agricultural materials of national historical significance available online.

The NEH grant is for the fifth phase of the long-term preservation project, the National Preservation Program for Agricultural Literature. The project will keep historically significant published materials on the history of state and local agriculture and rural life from being lost to natural decay.

"Preserving this historical knowledge is critical because, to a great extent, it captures the national character of Americans and the American experience," said Mary Ochs, the head of collection development and preservation at Mann Library. "Many documents, such as memoirs and transactions of early agricultural societies, seed catalogs, almanacs, extension service publications, archives, photographs, oral histories and periodicals for farm families and early agricultural enterprises are of invaluable historical significance. However, many of these materials are deteriorating and literally falling apart. To lose these materials would be an irreparable loss to the history of American values."

Mann Library will work with university libraries in other states to microfilm 1,150 titles in 2,707 volumes published between 1820 and 1945 from Georgia, Illinois and Ohio. In addition, the agricultural literature from Colorado, Maryland, Oklahoma and Washington will be reviewed and ranked, with the most important material being slated for microfilming in a later phase of the project.

The United States Agriculture Information Network and the National Agriculture Library developed the agricultural preservation project in 1993. Each state is expected to preserve its own local agricultural literature. Since 1996 over 30,000 volumes have been saved.

Some of the titles to be filmed over the next two years include the classic Livingston and the Tomato (1893), which contains descriptions and drawings of the varieties brought to life by A.W. Livingston, the Reynoldsburg tomato seedsman who was the best-known developer of tomato varieties in the United States in the 19th century. A Treatise on the Cultivation of the Grape in Vineyards (1850) also will be filmed, which is significant because it was in the Ohio River Valley where the Catawba grape was cultivated for making wine, which spearheaded an Ohio industry that grew to be the largest producer of wine in the "west" by 1860.

In addition, Mann Library is relaunching the CHLA Web site http://chla.library.cornell.edu, which is part of the same National Preservation Plan for Agricultural Literature.

The CHLA is a core electronic collection of agricultural texts published between the early19th century and the middle to late 20th century. Full-text materials cover agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, crops and their protection, food science, forestry, human nutrition, rural sociology and soil science. Scholars have selected the titles in this collection for their historical importance.