3. A National Preservation Program


extension publications. USAIN was established in 1988 to provide a forum for discussion of agricultural
issues, to take a leadership role in the formation of a national information policy as related to agriculture,
to make recommendations to NAL, and to promote cooperation and communication among its members.

In October 1991, USAIN sponsored a program to explore the feasibility of developing a national
program to preserve the literature of agriculture and rural life. Organized by Samuel Demas, Head of
Collection Development and Preservation, Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University, the two-day event
drew a group of thirty librarians, preservation experts, and representatives of funding agencies. Following
a review of the status of preservation programs and cooperative strategies, the group enthusiastically
endorsed the idea of a nationally-coordinated preservation program to ensure both preservation of, and
access to, the historical literature of agriculture and rural life. The attendees outlined recommendations
and a planning process and urged USAIN, together with NAL to prepare a more detailed plan.
Subsequently, the USAIN membership unanimously endorsed the recommendations.

USAIN appointed Brice Hobrock, Dean, Kansas State University Libraries, to chair an Advisory Panel on
Preservation that included Elizabeth Adkins, Kraft General Foods; Pamela Q. Andre, National
Agricultural Library; Wesley Boomgaarden, Ohio State University; Clinton Howard, University of
California at Davis; Barbara Williams Jenkins, South Carolina State University; Peggy Johnson, University
of Minnesota-St. Paul; Erich Kesse, University of Florida; Jan Kennedy Olsen, Cornell University; Julia
Peterson, Cargill Information Center; Keith Russell, National Agriculture Library; and Katherine L.
Walter, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The Advisory Panel hired Nancy E. Gwinn, Assistant Director,
Collections Management, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, to facilitate the planning process and draft the
national plan. To assist the group, Dorothy Wright, Preservation Librarian at Cornell's Albert R. Mann
Library, conducted a survey of land grant and other institutions to gauge the level of interest in
participating in a national program and to identify, in a preliminary way, priorities for preservation.

The resulting plan, A NATIONAL PRESERVATION PROGRAM FOR AGRICULTURAL LITERATURE
(USAIN, 1993) was adopted by the USAIN membership in October 1993 as a guiding document for
coordinating and stimulating preservation efforts within the agricultural sciences. Throughout this
process USAIN has provided organizational sponsorship for development and implementation of this
plan. [See Appendix B for letters of support from the president of the USAIN Executive Council and the
director of NAL.]

The national preservation plan provides a disciplinary framework within which to divide the preservation
challenge among USAIN libraries. Its goals are being accomplished through a series of systematically
organized and coordinated projects combined with local initiatives. Preservation projects may be
structured around genre, period, region, subject, or combination of these, and will use a variety of
preservation strategies including reformatting to microfilm or digital formats, preserving the original, or a
combination of these depending on the nature of the material, its condition, and its expected use.

Progress in implementing the USAIN National Preservation Program for Agricultural Literature

Over the past 4 years considerable progress has been made in advancing this unique national cooperative
plan for systematic preservation of the literature of a discipline. Table 1 shows the key components of the
agricultural literature in the National Preservation Program for Agriculture and assignments of
preservation responsibility for each component.