3. A National Preservation Program


The proposed project addresses the components labeled "State and County Documents" and "Core
Historical Literature--Popular and Trade Journals". Popular and trade journals, identified in the Core
Historical Literature Project, have been divided by state of publication and are folded into the state and
local level preservation projects. Phase 1 of the proposed project has enabled 9 states to move forward in
fulfilling their responsibilities under the plan. The proposed Phase 2 project will allow 4 of those 9 states
to complete their microfilming of top ranked materials and will bring 6 new states into the project.

The land grant publications of 42 states have already been preserved in a cooperative microfilming
project led by NAL (component labeled "Land Grant Publications" in Table 1). Work completed in this
ground-breaking 'cooperative preservation project is taken into account in the USAIN National
Preservation Program and in the proposed NEH project. Those land grant titles already filmed in the
earlier project will be excluded from the current project, and any titles missed in the earlier project will
be considered in the current project. Also, the 8 states which did not film their land grant publications as
part of the NAL cooperative project will do so in the course of future phases of the project project to
preserve state and local literature.

In an entirely separate project, work is well underway on a central component of the National
Preservation Program for Agriculture, labeled "Core Historical Literature--Scholarly Monographs and
Serials" in Table 1. For several years, the Albert R. Mann Library at Cornell University has been working
on the preservation of the Core Historical Literature of Agriculture. With funding from the Rockefeller
Foundation and support from the Hatch Act and the NAL, Wallace C. Olsen directed a major
bibliographic effort to identify the most significant, or core, literature of the agricultural sciences
published since 1950. Later the methodology was adapted to historical literature, principally to assist in
developing preservation priorities for materials of national scope and importance. The core historical
literature is being preserved in a series of projects. Most recently Cornell has completed scanning and
producing COM film for 1,250 volumes in agricultural economics and rural sociology that have not
already been microfilmed. The two-year project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities
and directed by Ann Kenney, Associate Director of the Department of Preservation and Conservation at
Cornell, tested the feasibility of using digital image technology to create microfilm that will meet national
preservation standards for quality and image permanence. Another 1,000 volumes of the core historical
literature was scanned with funding from Title II-C, U.S. Department of Education, under the direction of
Sam Demas. A project to secure permission for national distribution of those titles still under copyright
protection is underway with funding from the National Agricultural Library. The goal of the Core
Historical Literature project is to have archival microform for preservation of the entire corpus of over
20,000 volumes, and to distribute nationally in electronic form the full corpus for access purposes.

With the appointment of Evelyn Frangakis as NAL Preservation Officer and a permanent allocation of
funds to establish a preservation program, NAL has commenced work on the components of the plan
labeled "Federal Documents" and Pre-1862 Imprints".

This year a new component is being added to the National Preservation Program for Agriculture: an
action plan for preservation of the digital publications of the USDA. A conference on the topic was held
March 2-4, 1997 and the resulting draft "Action Plan for Preserving USDA Digital Publications" is under
review and will be formally added to the National Preservation Program for Agriculture upon
completion.

Other elements of the national plan will be advanced by initiatives of the members and by the USAIN
National Preservation Program Steering Committee. Its members include Samuel Demas (chair); Evelyn
Frangakis, NAL Preservation Officer; Jan Olsen, Director, Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University;
Brice Hobrock, Dean of Libraries, Kansas State University; Maria Pisa, Assistant Director for Policy and
Planning, National Agricultural Library; Barbara Jenkins, Dean of Libraries and Information Services,