3. A National Preservation Program


Justin Smith Morrill, a representative and later senator from Vermont introduced legislation to Congress
in 1857, and finally obtained its passage in 1862, to establish a system of colleges dedicated to teaching
agriculture, military tactics, and the mechanical arts--as well as classical studies--so that the working
classes could obtain a liberal, practical education. The addition of military tactics to the original 1857 bill
helped obtain its passage during the worn-tor years of the Civil War-combined with a president with
rural roots who appreciated the need for access to education for all citizens.

The Morrill Act of 1862 provided grants, in the form of federal lands, to each state to establish a "land
grant" college. In 1887, the Hatch Act extended the land grant system by authorizing direct payment of
grant funds to each state to establish an agricultural experiment station in conjunction with the land grant
institution. The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 created a Cooperative Extension Service associated with each
land grant institution. The land grant universities are connected to the citizens of the state by means of
Cooperative Extension Service offices and staff in every county of most states. Thus, in addition to
education, the research, publication, and dissemination of information to the average citizen were
deliberate outcomes of the land grant system.

Concurrent with the establishment of the land grant colleges, Congress established the Department of
Agriculture (USDA) to promote the interests of farmers--a persistent idea since George Washington's
days as president. The effectiveness of the U.S. agricultural system lies in the cooperation among
government, the universities, and industry; a system that has produced perhaps the most successful
research and development program in history. From the beginning, the interests of the land grant
colleges and universities extended beyond the technology of farming to farm management, rural
sociology, agricultural economics, land management, home economics, rural life, and social, family, and
community concerns. Complementing the contribution of the land grant colleges, considerable rural-
related, disciplinary social science research was conducted by historians, political scientists, general
economists, sociologists, and anthropologists. The preservation of these sources is also vital to an
understanding of the history of agriculture, rural life, and U.S. history.


3.2 A NATIONAL PRESERVATION PLAN FOR AGRICULTURE


Not surprisingly, the libraries of the land grant colleges and universities hold the nation's strongest
collections of agricultural literature. Collection and dissemination of information was part of the land
grant mandate, and the close ties between the land grant institutions and the agricultural experiment
stations and extension services ensured intensive collection of their publications, as well as those of the
many agricultural societies and rural organizations, along with the relevant popular, trade and scholarly
literature. Much state and local level agriculture and rural life literature was published in short runs and
was not widely disseminated. Adding to the problem of scarcity is the fact that much of this material was
considered at the time of its publication to be out of collection scope by many of the nation's major
research libraries. Consequently historians from non-land grant libraries often have to travel to land
grant libraries to conduct their research. Additionally, the problem of deteriorating and brittle paper
affects the historical literature of agriculture as severely as it affects all publications produced before
1950, creating a preservation crisis that threatens to destroy access to the record of our agricultural past.

Beginning in the late 1980's, Cornell and other leading land grant universities--in cooperation with the
United States Agriculture Information Network (USAIN) and the National Agriculture Library (NAL)--
began discussion of the need to initiate a nationally coordinated plan to preserve and improve access to
the historical literature of agriculture, rural life, and the agricultural sciences. NAL had a foundation of
past preservation activity upon which to base future efforts, including a cooperative project with the land
grant university libraries conducted from 1974 through 1987 to microfilm agricultural, forestry, and