At 09:42 PM 8/8/99 -0700, Misha wrote:
>Howdy, all--
>
>An interesting issue that Larry London seeded here re: the value of
>older ag publications, many of which, because they predate chemical
>intensive methods, contain rich humus for us sustaggies...and anyone
>concerned with agricultural practices invented sometime prior to last
>year by Corporation X in "university-industry partnership" with Land
>Grant Z.
>
>A few thoughts.
>
>1) Many land grant college of ag libraries have large holdings of
>these old publications; some are being decatalogued and disposed of
>at a frightening rate. When I was at UW-Madison, ag library staff
>were pressured to make room for new publications, and that often
>means that older ones go to Cutter collections...or the dumpster or
>book sales.
>
>But at Madison's ag library--Steenbock--there were a number of folks
>with the good sense to know what riches these publications contained,
>and to foresee a day when people might once again care about what's
>in them. There were several folks engaged in trying to raise money to
>get these crumbling old ag publications into electronic format, so
>their contents would be preserved in that medium. If I remember
>correctly, there was a multi-land-grant initiative on this--and my
>notes on this are back in Madison. I'm cc'ing this note to Gretchen
>Farwell, the assistant director of Steenbock and a long-time advocate
>of sustainable ag information systems. If she replies, I'll post any
>helpful info to the group, or she can. Gretchen, thanks in advance.
>
>2) The loss of cultural memory in agriculture, to my view, is no less
>important than the loss of, say, a language. I always think of the
>National Yiddish Book Center, founded out of the efforts of one man,
>Aaron Lansky, who while a student of Yiddish literature in Montreal
>realized that countless books in Yiddish were being discarded. These
>books--the property and cultural memory of people who had survived
>the /pogroms/ of eastern Europe, the Holocaust, and Stalin's
>"reforms"--were sometimes discarded by the children or grandchildren
>of those people, either because they couldn't read them, or didn't
>see the value in them. Lansky made it his life's work to collect
>these books, and he recruited other young people to do this also. In
>1980 he founded the NYBC (a loft in a building in New York, I seem to
>remember), and it grew from this early collection of cast-off books
>to a cultural center in Amherst, MA, with holdings of 1.4 million
>books in a language that has been revitalized, largely thanks to his
>efforts. (In 1980, Yiddish experts believed that there were perhaps
>70,000 extant books in the language worldwide; they were off by some
>orders of magnitude.) The NYBC has also built Yiddish book
>collections at scholarly libraries all over the world, as it has come
>across duplicate editions of books. Thus the written cultural memory
>of a people in diaspora has been preserved, and allowed to find its
>way back into living memory.
>
>Who is doing this for old ag publications? Who is going to farm
>auctions to look for old treatises on husbandry, mechanicking,
>breeding, etc.? How often does it happen that an elder ag agent
>passes away, or surviving widow/er does, and a lifetime collection of
>books and periodicals is lost? Or a rural library closes, ditto?
>Where are the regional or state or private holdings of these
>materials, and who is talking to their collectors? Who is developing
>annotated bibliographies of the catalogued and uncatalogued materials?
>
>The luminous and wonderful Walworth Co., WI, ag agent Lee Cunningham
>and I have had this discussion several times over the course of the
>past 5 or 6 years. He makes it part of his calling to give a home to
>old ag publications that he finds, or that people offer him. He said
>that people come to him because they try to donate books to their
>local libraries and are told that the libraries don't have the
>resources of shelf space or cataloguing labor to bring the books into
>their collections.
>
>Of course preference for those resources goes to Danielle Steel or
>Tom Clancy best sellers, since libraries now must justify their
>existence by stocking what the customers want. And libraries no
>longer collect books to preserve them. They are subject to vast
>economies of preference, taste, revenues, and technological capacity.
>In other words, demand means shelf space--in libraries, as in
>supermarkets.
>
>So I ask again--who is doing this for pre-high-chemical/high-tech ag
>books? Who in sustainable agriculture should assess and speak on
>behalf of this loss of cultural memory? I know that the National
>Agricultural Library does what it can--but when's the last time those
>folks had the resources to publicize NAL's holdings of those
>materials, or make them available in more easily replicable media, or
>develop user's guides or navigational guides to what's out there?
>
>I have serious concerns that most of sustainable ag's resources--both
>at the national and regional level--are being targeted at the
>production of new information via research funding. And that very
>little, if any, is being targeted at the creation of KNOWLEDGE
>COMMUNITIES or that preserve that information, and put it into
>context--a context that includes not only the new findings, but the
>older ones as well. Or KNOWLEDGE NAVIGATION TOOLS that allow people
>to access this information.
>
>Efforts to do this have struggled uphill like a VW Beetle in the
>Rocky Mts., running with a hot # 3 cylinder and worn-down points.
>Look at the struggles that the Alternative Farming Systems
>Information Center at NAL faces--AFSIC's staff for years now have
>tried to fill some of this role, doing carefully honed Agricola
>searches of NAL holdings to help us seekers of information know
>what's available. A service like that, Dan Glickman should be handing
>them big foamcore-mounted checks at press conferences, saying thank
>you with numbers with many zeroes behind it.
>
>
>3) Finally, I've said this before (Cramer, you can plug your ears,
>because you've heard this rant more than a couple dozen times :^) but
>the consolidation of the publishing and telecommunications industry,
>coupled with the privatization of Extension, promises DISASTER for
>sustainable ag and the cultural memory we are trying to build with
>current sustag information products. If public institutions don't
>take up this slack, then sustainable ag information and
>communications will inevitably go to the highest private or corporate
>bidder. Wanna start making some guesses as to who that could be?
>
>Our information products are highly unlikely to able to either
>maintain market share *or* exist on a cost-recovery basis. Unless, of
>course, sustainable ag is recast as something to sell to the masses
>(mainstream farmers) and the cutting-edge nature of it is
>blunted...or forgotten..
>
>Robert Rodale knew this--he was happy to publish /The New Farm/ and
>let other publications pay for it. I've heard him blasted as a poor
>businessman, but he certainly knew how to build an effective
>knowledge network.
>
>We in sustag have limited ability, in a fragmented way, to create
>information products within our various organizations...but then
>these products are so dispersed, and the organizations so poorly
>networked, that I see us as the equivalent of mediaeval monastic
>libraries in the Dark Ages. A bunch of people scattered across the
>world, trying to keep our respective little candles burning in a
>howling cultural/economic wind. The Internet has been one of the only
>ways we've had to talk to each other, and many of us here on SANET
>got here in the good old days, when universal access was still a
>principle of Internetworking. (AOL kissed that good bye, for
>everyone, in a big way by equating access with how much money they
>could make getting as many people as possible "on the Net" to look
>for--never mind.)
>
>The physics of publishing are increasingly moving in the same
>direction as everything else in the economy: cheap, mass scale
>products or costly, luxury ones. Finding publishers who will produce
>and then market a book (never mind a pamphlet or CD or video) with a
>limited-at-best readership grows ever more difficult. Niche
>publishers struggle along till their well-intentioned people burn out
>under the heat of their own efforts.
>
>This is why ATTRA is such an EXPONENTIALLY IMPORTANT INITIATIVE.
>Their library of sustainable-farmer-oriented literature could prove
>to be one of the most critical cultural resources in the nation
>someday. Not to mention the perfect information and knowledge
>complement to NAL's holdings of scholarly literature.
>
>This is why the Sustainable Farming Connection Web site was such a
>BRILLIANT IDEA (though it never got the resource support it needed to
>get it truly off the ground and sustain it as it deserves).
>
>Enough for now. Larry, thanks for seeding the topic. I wish we could
>all mosey across the street to The Sand Bar, the little neighborhood
>pub that advertises itself as "on the edge of Western civilization,"
>and put our feet up, and talk about this stuff till the wee hours.
>
>Lacking the luxury of realtime conversation amongst us all...gods,
>I'm grateful for this Internet group. Thanks Andy, Abioli, Jane, and
>USDA/NAL. We often neglect to bow in your direction.
>
>And thanks, all, for listening.
>
>Writing from lands end, I wish you all
>
>
>peace
>misha
>
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>Michele Gale-Sinex
>Communications manager
>Center for Integrated Ag Systems, UW-Madison
>http://www.wisc.edu
>UW voice mail: 608-262-8018
>Home office: 415-504-6474 (504-MISH)
>Home office fax: Same as above, phone first for enabling
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>We're not against ideas. We're against people spreading them.
>--Augusto Pinochet
>
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