1. Precis


1. PRECIS

Cornell University, on behalf of the United States Agriculture Information Network
(USAIN), and in cooperation with eight other land grant university libraries, seeks
$1,786,401 in support from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a two-
year project to preserve the most significant published materials on the history of
state and local agriculture and rural life. The project will utilize a model developed
as a pilot for the National Preservation Program for Agricultural Literature and
implemented for New York State by Cornell University's Mann Library, a leader in
the preservation of agricultural literature. The Cornell model partners scholars and
librarians to identify and preserve the most significant agricultural literature of a
state. The plan for administration, coordination and management is based on
established models for cooperative preservation projects used by the Committee on
Institutional Cooperation and the Research Libraries Group Great Collection
projects. In this national project, approximately 9,185 titles in 16,628 volumes
published between 1820 and 1945 will be preserved from a diverse cross section of
states representative of the history of American agriculture and rural life including
Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Nebraska, New York, Pennsylvania,
Texas, and Wisconsin.

This project is an integral part of the NATIONAL PRESERVATION PROGRAM
FOR AGRICULTURAL LITERATURE developed by USAIN and the National
Agriculture Library in 1993. This national disciplinary preservation plan for
agriculture calls for each state in the U.S. to take responsibility for preservation of its
own state and local level literature. The proposed project will result in the
systematic identification of the universe of state and local level published literature
in each participating state, not just the titles held in each of the participating
libraries. In each state a panel of scholars and librarians will then evaluate and rank
the resulting lists in terms of the importance of individual titles for research in
social, cultural, and economic history. Each state will then microfilm those brittle
titles judged by the panel to be most important for current and future humanities
research.

Funding is requested to preserve the top 25% of titles judged important for
humanities research. This 25%, in combination with the 10 20% of the relevant
literature typically already filmed in most states, will result in preservation of
approximately 35-45% of the relevant historical record in each state.