4. Plan of Work--Bibliographic Analysis


4.3 BIBLIOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS AND SELECTION FOR
 PRESERVATION


Over the last decade, research libraries and archives, with funding assistance from federal and private
sources, have mounted an impressive national effort to preserve our nation's endangered intellectual
heritage. As the program has evolved, so have the strategies for defining and selecting the highest
priority materials for preservation. A number of projects have employed the "great collections" model
introduced by the Research Libraries Group, whereby materials on a particular subject are preserved from
the "great" collection of an individual library. The use of the national bibliographic databases to
disseminate information about what has been preserved has allowed more than one "great collection"
library to work in a subject area without duplication of effort. However, this approach to selection for
preservation does not meet the need of scholars for the systematic preservation of the "core literature" of
a discipline. Nor does it meet the national program's need to be selective and cost-effective.

The preservation problem in research libraries is estimated to include over twelve million unique
published titles requiring preservation. When Congress increased funding for the National Endowment
for the Humanities in 1988, the national program was targeted to preserve a selected three million
volumes over a twenty-year period. Thus, at the same time that Congress and research libraries
acknowledged the urgency of the preservation problem, they also recognized that it would be impossible,
given financial realities, to preserve everything. While the "great collections" approach has been a
valuable component of the national program, when considered in the context of limited funding, it can
not meet the goal of developing a coordinated and focused strategy to preserve the highest priority
literature of individual disciplines.

The limitations of funding from both federal and local sources demand that the national program be
highly selective. Some preservation projects, in order to carefully target the national program to the
needs of scholars, have employed the strategy of a partnership between scholars and librarians to analyze
the literature and designate priorities. Such a strategy can be particularly effective when applied to a
specific discipline such as the history of agriculture and rural life.

In addition, to further advance the goals of coordination, cost-effectiveness, and selectivity, a powerful
strategy has begun to emerge whereby materials are designated for preservation based on a
comprehensive national plan for the preservation of the literature of a discipline. Such a plan defines and
analyzes the literature of an academic or research discipline, sets priorities for preservation, identifies the
major players, and organizes projects around logical topics or genre. Programs are underway in such
diverse disciplines as theology, biomedicine, performing arts, anthropology, geology, architecture, art
history, and agriculture. Through the experience of these programs and consensus among research
libraries and library consortia, national preservation planning, discipline by discipline, is emerging as a
rational and cost-efficient model for establishing priorities and designing projects.

The value of this model lies not only in its cost-effectiveness--there will never be enough resources to
preserve all materials in a particular discipline--but also in its involvement of scholars in the selection
process. Furthermore, the process of ranking the literature in terms of preservation priorities can provide
the basis for a series of incremental projects.

This project employs the model of a discipline-based preservation project and continues the work of the
phase 1 project. Its purpose is to preserve additional materials and improve access to them--thus
approaching a critical mass of the most significant publications that document the history of U.S.
agriculture and rural life between 1820 and 1945 from a diverse cross-section of states This cooperative
project will be conducted with ten land grant university libraries across the United States (and their
partners as appropriate) using the proven methodology for bibliographic analysis and evaluation