Demas & Powell
Demas & Powell
The National Preservation Program for Agricultural Literature (NPPAL), a discipline-based preservation plan, was adopted by USAIN in 1993. With leadership from its governing USAIN National Preservation Plan Steering Committee, substantial progress has been achieved.
The NPPAL's steering committee, representing USAIN constituents and including specialists in collection development, preservation, and library administration, is composed of the following members: Sam Demas (Chair), Evelyn Frangakis, Brice Hobrock, Barbara Jenkins, Jan Olsen, and the NAL Director as a non-voting member (Maria Pisa has served as the Director's delegate). Wes Boomgaarden, who served on the committee for four years (two as Co-Chair), has resigned, and his energy and enthusiasm will be missed. There are currently several vacancies on the Steering Committee, which will be filled through a call for expressions of interest from the USAIN President.
The defining characteristics of the NPPAL are that it: 1) is a national cooperative plan, 2) is discipline based, looking beyond the preservation needs of individual collections to the needs of the discipline as a whole, 3) involves scholars in setting preservation priorities, and 4) has a national library (NAL) that serves a central role as an archive for the literature of agriculture preserved through a series of cooperative projects.
The chief recommendations of the NPPAL are: the formation of a preservation program at NAL; appointment of a full-time national preservation plan coordinator to raise funds and coordinate the NPPAL; and implementation of a series of cooperative projects based on a conceptual framework that divides the literature of agriculture into a number of logical component parts and assigns responsibility for each.
NAL received funding to implement a preservation program and appointed Evelyn Frangakis as NAL Preservation Officer in January 1997. In the absence of a National Preservation Plan Coordinator, the Mann Libraryat Cornell University has volunteered leadership in coordinating activities of the NPPAL, and both NAL and Cornell have provided staffand funds to assist the program's movement forward.
What follows is a summary of preservation activity in several of the component parts of the NPPAL.
Each state is responsible for preserving its agriculture and rural life literature. Under a USAIN cooperative preservation project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), 9 states (AL, CA, CT, FL, NB, NY, PA, TX, & WI) have identified and set preservation priorities (involving panels of scholars) for their state's relevant publishing and 4 states are proceeding to film the top-ranked materials. With funding from USAIN and NAL, an NEH proposal was written for phase 2 of this project, which would extend this preservation activity for 4 continuing states and add 7 new states (AK,AZ, HI, IA, KS, MN, & MT). If the phase 2 proposal is funded, fulfillment of this component of the plan will be underway in 33% ofthe states.
NAL is assessing the status of the film and cataloging on the results of the cooperative microfilming project it led. The few states whichdid not participate in the earlier project will be encouraged top reserve their land grant publications within the framework of the state and local literature component.
Cornell University is responsible for scanning and making available to the nation the core historical monographs and journals of U.S.agriculture, identified by Wallace C. Olsen as part of the Core Literature Project. So far, 2,340 volumes have been scanned. NAL has provided funding to Cornell to secure permission to make accessible those volumes in the core historical literature which are still under copyright.
NAL, with responsibility for preserving relevant federal documents, has begun to digitize several federal titles (two monographs as well as the Journal of Agricultural Research) using preservation quality scanning. NAL has also begun to establish overall and specific priorities for preservation of federal publications.
NAL, with responsibility for leading an effort to conserve early imprints in U.S. agriculture, conserves these publications as needed. NAL has begun to establish a special collections conservation plan as part of its overall preservation goals.
Cornell has allocated funding to plan for creation of a published guide to manuscript and archival collections in agriculture and rural life. This Guide will serve as a basis for setting priorities and coordinating national activity in this component part of the literature.
Other component parts of the literature (e.g., unique subject collections, newspapers, A/V materials) have not as yet beenaddressed. Work has begun to supplement the NPPAL by moving into digital publication preservation. NAL, with the Economic Research Service of the USDA (ERS), GPO, Cornell University, and the Farm Foundation recently took the first step in a cooperative venture by convening a 2-day meeting, "USDA Digital Publications: Creating a Preservation Action Plan," held March 3-4, 1997 in Washington, DC. Under the auspices of the NAL, the meeting was organized by Cornell University's Albert R. Mann Library. The meeting served as a call to action to develop a preservation strategy for USDA digital publications. Duringthe meeting representatives of groups that have shared interests and responsibility for digital publication preservation began to identify the major elements and requirements of such a plan. A subsequent consultant's report has been issued to NAL and Cornell, "Action Plan For the Preservation of and Permanent Public Access to Digital USDA Publications." NAL is reviewing the plan and identifying actions to move it forward in the USDA. Following USDA administration approval, NAL will oversee implementation of the plan in cooperation with government and non-government partners. Other component parts of the literature (e.g., unique subject collections, newspapers, A/Vmaterials) have not as yet been been addressed.