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Ithaca, New York
January 24, 2001
Cornell University's Albert R. Mann Library has unveiled
a web site devoted to rare, historically significant books on
agriculture. Not merely citations, the books can be read in full online.
The library's Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) is an
electronic collection of the most important agricultural texts published
between the early 19th century and the mid-20th century. The collection
includes 825 full-text monographs with over 300,000 scanned pages covering
topics from agricultural economics and engineering to food and soil
science. The web site is located at http://chla.mannlib.cornell.edu.
"A lot of the books are older, of course, and the acidic paper has
deteriorated. Many libraries are in danger of having rare books
disintegrate," says Joy Paulson, the preservation librarian. "We're making
sure that we have copies of these important books in some format. Right
now digital is easy to access, and putting these books online means that
they are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all over the world."
Paulson and Michael Cook, social sciences bibliographer for Mann Library,
are both responsible for this long-time project. CHLA can be traced back
10 years when the Mann Library and the U.S. Agricultural Information
Network developed a unified national plan for preserving agricultural
literature in the United States. The result was the National Preservation
Program for Agricultural Literature, which since 1993 has been the
framework for all national preservation in this field.
Mann Library set out to identify the key scholarly literature that needed
preservation. For five years, Wallace Olsen, special projects librarian,
headed a national group of scholars that identified this literature. The
result: A list of more than 4,500 scholarly monographs and journals in
seven agricultural fields that was published in the award-winning
Literature of the Agricultural Sciences series from Cornell University
Press. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the
U.S. Department of Education and the Rockefeller Foundation, CHLA began the
tedious process of tracking down the books and putting them into digital
form.
The titles range from the pragmatic to the simply charming. There is
W.H.R. Curtler's The Enclosure And Redistribution Of Our Land (1920), on
the history of land tenure in Great Britain, and Mary Meek Atkeson's The
Woman On The Farm (1924). There is the classically practical Grapes:
Peaches: Melons: And How To Grow Them, and Tree Habits; How To Know The
Hardwoods. And there are historically intriguing works like Farm
Appliances: A Practical Manual (1887), with tips on how to improve pig
troughs and lubricate wagon axles; or the Hercules Powder Co.'s Hercules
Dynamite On The Farm: Tree Planting, Soil Blasting, Tree Rejuvenation, and
Other Farm Uses from the 1930s.
Eventually CHLA will have the full text of more than 2,000 monographs and
150 journal titles. While there are currently no journal titles available,
over the next several years the full text of nearly 40 journals with
copyright clearance will be added. Scanning has already begun on titles
such as Agricultural History, Journal of Farm Economics and Annals of the
Entomological Society of America. These should be available later this
year.
Also coming next year is the Fruits of New York series, U.P. Hedrick's
illustrated set of books from the early 20th century on pears, grapes and
other Empire State fruits. CHLA currently is working to obtain scanned
color illustrations of Hedrick's works.
The web version of this release may be found at
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Jan01/OnLineBooks.bpf.html
Contact: Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.
Office: 607-255-3290
E-mail: bpf2@cornell.edu
Cornell University News Service
Surge 3
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
607-255-4206
cunews@cornell.edu
http://www.news.cornell.edu
Cornell University news release
N3274 |
