3. A National Preservation Program


The project will result in the preservation of at least the most important 25% of the total universe of
publications on each state's agricultural and rural life heritage in 30% of the states in the U.S.

Additional outcomes will be to: 1) continue the momentum for the National Preservation Program for
Agricultural Literature; 2) complement the national Core Historical Literature project underway at
Cornell; 3) replicate and adapt the Cornell model for preservation of state literature through the
experience of other states, and publish an article on the project and its methods; 4.) serve as inspiration
for additional states to follow suit, thereby building a more complete national picture of the history of
agriculture and rural life; and 5.) prepare the way for other coordinated projects to meet the goals of the
national plan, including unique collections of primary resource materials such as manuscripts and
archives.

Work on the Phase 1 Project (participants are Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Nebraska, New
York, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin) is proceeding smoothly and on target in terms of project
benchmarks. A second Project Managers meeting will be held in San Francisco in June 1997 to take
stock of lessons learned in conducting the bibliographic and scholarly review components of the project
(see Section 4.3). Experience gained thus far in Phase 1 has informed the formulation of this Phase 2
proposal.



The development of a national preservation plan for agricultural literature is consistent with the concept
of a discipline-based approach to preservation. It emphasizes selection of the most important material
from the universe of relevant literature, the involvement of scholars in the selection process, and a
cooperative approach that acknowledges that the most important materials will be found throughout more
than one library. The discipline-specific approach to preservation is also based on the fact that society is
unlikely to allocate sufficient funds to preserve all of the publications in any given discipline and that,
furthermore, not everything that was published is worthy of preservation. With a well-developed
preservation infrastructure in place, the need to develop and implement intellectually-viable, cost-effective
strategies for preservation, discipline by discipline, begins to take on greater importance and urgency.

To our knowledge, this is the largest, most systematic, discipline-based, cooperative preservation project
ever undertaken. Scholars involved in the evaluation process are delighted with the opportunity to
participate in a systematic process of identifying and setting preservation priorities for this important
literature. Cooperation within and among the states has been excellent, and all indications thus far are that
this approach has potential as a model for cooperative preservation in other disciplines.