3. A National Preservation Program


 We cannot solve the problems with knowledge
 of the present day alone.
 Prophecy is conditioned on experience
 and the longer the experience and the keener the appreciation of it,
 the truer will be our judgments.
 In all the bewildering opinion and achievement, we must not forget.
 --Liberty Hyde Bailey

The development of a national program to preserve the history of agriculture and rural life is a logical
extension of the work carried out by land grant universities in cooperation with federal, state, and local
agencies to benefit farm families and rural society. The land grant universities of the U.S. constitute a
remarkable and uniquely American research, education, and extension system with a long tradition of
cooperation and a legal mandate to serve the citizens of the nation.

The intense focus of each of the nation's 72 land grant universities on the citizens, the agriculture, and the
environment of their particular state, has resulted, among other things, in a remarkable set of library
collections. Materials documenting state and local agriculture and rural life have been primary
collecting responsibilities of land grant libraries for over a century. Better than any other resource, these
collections document the concerns, needs, interests, aspirations, and resources of the people of each state.
While these collections were largely built in the service of then current needs of science, technology, the
state, commerce, and the average citizen, they have become prime historical repositories and priority
targets for preservation in the interest of humanities research.

Mindful of this, the land grant university libraries, working closely with the National Agricultural Library
(NAL) through the United States Agricultural Information Network (USAIN), have developed a national
preservation plan to preserve this record. Organized state by state, with a history of and structure for
national level cooperation, this consortium of libraries is uniquely positioned to systematically preserve
an important slice of American history.


3.1 THE LAND GRANT UNIVERSITY MISSION


 The best acreage for a farmer to cultivate
 lies within the ring fence of his skull.
 --Charles Dickens

The system of land grant universities was established out of a deep American impulse to democratize
education, to consciously direct knowledge and research in the interests of the average citizen, and to
improve the productivity of our food and fiber system and the quality of rural life.

At the time of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, existing colleges and seminaries
were dedicated to classical studies on the model of their European counterparts. These institutions existed
to educate the monied classes, government leaders, and the professions--not to serve a democratic society
dedicated to the concept of opportunity for all. In the 1840's, Jonathan Baldwin Turner of Illinois, a Yale-
educated farmer, newspaper editor, and college professor, made education for the working classes a
cause. His "Plan for a State University for the Industrial Classes" advanced ideas that are now fundamental
to the land grant system, such as experimental research and its dissemination. What began as mild protest
against the too-exclusive pattern of collegiate education in the new country, grew into widespread
agitation by the middle of the nineteenth century, and Congress began to seriously debate the role of the
federal government in higher education. Newly formed agricultural societies, in particular, insisted that
colleges where agriculture could be studied must be widely available.