Mary Gold wrote:
> Michele,
>
> Thanks for the focus on "loss of cultural memory", and the encouragement to
> us here at the National Ag. Library! I have appreciated the whole sanet-mg
> exchange on old ag publications. As an ag librarian and a history major, I
> am doubly aware of the treasures that lie on the shelves above my office,
> and the "community of knowledge" (I like that term) that they represent.
> Each time I venture into the stacks I am amazed at what I find. There
> doesn't seem to be any aspect of food and fiber production that hasn't been
> addressed before. (In fact, I have come to believe that if I can't find
> something there it's because I haven't looked hard enough... just need more
> hours in the day.) I have stopped being surprised by the depth of
> information (some of it decades old) on every "new" concept that I am
> researching. I too, lament the waning of attention paid to these resources.
>
> The National Agricultural Library Reference staff and the Alternative
> Farming Systems Information Center have worked to make some of the wonderful
> information here more accessible to the public. Resources permitting (I
> also like the large check with many zeros image!), we will continue the
> effort. Some of the work done here includes:
>
> GUIDE TO HISTORICAL RESEARCH AT THE NATIONAL AGRICULTURAL LIBRARY: THE
> GENERAL COLLECTION (Special Reference Briefs: SRB 94-02), by Susan Chapman,
> Reference and User Services Branch [This publication is designed as an
> entree to historical research at the National Agricultural Library, not as a
> comprehensive bibliography. Only a small number of the thousands of books
> and articles of historical interest have been included. Although the
> collection is worldwide in scope, containing material in some 75 languages,
> emphasis is on American agriculture and on English language publications.
>
> The Guide is divided into two sections: the General Collection, and
> Additional Resources. In addition to works dealing exclusively with
> agriculture, a limited number of selected materials in general history, the
> history of science, medicine, and technology, and general biography have
> been included. An update is in process.]
> http://www.nal.usda.gov/ref/history.htm
>
> The NAL Reference Staff have also put together indexes to the following USDA
> series:
> [none are available on the website yet; however, very limited supplies of
> hardcopy versions are available on request. Reference and AFSIC staff can
> also search for specific topics and titles in these series on request.]
>
> Index to USDA Miscellaneous Publications, Numbers 1-1479, compiled by Ellen
> Kay Miller. NAL, 1992. 109 p. NAL call no.: aS21.A99 1992 [Misc.
> Publications began publication in 1927]
>
> Index to USDA Technical Bulletins, Numbers 1-1802, compiled by Ellen Kay
> Miller. NAL, 1993. 120 p. NAL call no.: aZ5073.I52 1993 [Technical Bulletins
> began publication in 1927]
>
> USDA Agriculture Handbooks: Numbers 1-690, compiled by Ellen Kay Miller.
> NAL, 1992. 55 p. NAL call no.: S501.2 [Handbooks began publication in 1950]
>
> Index to USDA Agricultural Information Bulletins, Numbers 1-649, compiled by
> Ellen Kay Miller. NAL, 1992. NAL call no.: aS21.A74M54 1992 [Ag. Info.
> Bulletins began publication in 1949]
>
> NAL, along with a consortium of other agricultural libraries, has also been
> active in several Preservation projects (digital and microfilm) of historic
> materials.
> http://www.nal.usda.gov/preservation/
>
> Finally, NAL does accept donations of older books and journals, video tapes,
> etc. For their policies see: Gift and Exchange Program
> http://www.nal.usda.gov/acq/gift_and_exchange.html
>
> AFSIC Resources:
>
> Tracing the Evolution of Organic/Sustainable Agriculture: A Selected and
> Annotated Bibliography, compiled by Jane Potter Gates. Bibliographies and
> Literature of Agriculture (BLA) no. 72. NAL, November 1988.
> http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/AFSIC_pubs/tracing.htm
>
> During the late 80s and early 90s, Jane Gates worked on a series of "oral
> histories", videotaped interviews with "people who have provided leadership
> and inspiration in the field of alternative or sustainable agriculture."
> Interviewees include Wes Jackson, Fred Kirschenmann, William Lockeretz,
> Patrick Madden, James Duke, Robert Rodale, Paul O'Connell, Dick Thompson,
> Jayne MacLean, Charles Francis, and Garth Youngberg. The tapes are
> available through Interlibrary Loan, or can be viewed here at NAL.
>
> AFSIC recently published Vegetables and Fruits: A Guide to Heirloom
> Varieties and Community-Based Stewardship, by Suzanne DeMuth. NAL, September
> 1998. (3 Volumes.) It is a wonderful resource on historic American
> vegetable and fruit varieties. Volume 3 addresses older publications in
> particular related to varieties. All three volumes (Volume 1. Annotated
> Bibliography; Volume 2. Resource Organizations; Volume 3. Historical
> Supplement) are available in hardcopy from our office or can be read via our
> website: http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/AFSIC_pubs/heirloom/heirloom.htm
>
> Although I am an enthusiastic advocate of making this knowledge
> electronically available, there is something special about leafing through
> the old volumes of planting guides, market plans, and field studies. Here
> at the Library, I can actually do that. Most of the documents indexed in
> the above publications can be requested, leafed through, read, and
> photocopied in the NAL Reference area. The National Agricultural Library is
> open to the public every weekday, 8 to 4:30. Within the US, the materials
> can also be requested through Interlibrary Loan.
>
> Thanks from Abiola, Andy, Jane and me for your message, Michelle. And
> thanks for giving me the chance to pass along information about the candle
> burners here at the Library and AFSIC.
>
> Sincerely,
> Mary
>
> Mary V. Gold
> Alternative Farming Systems Information Center
> National Agricultural Library, ARS, USDA
> 10301 Baltimore Ave., Room 304
> Beltsville MD 20705-2351
> phone: 301-504-6559
> fax: 301-504-6409
> e-mail: mgold@nal.usda.gov
> http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Misha [mailto:mgs23@pacbell.net]
> Sent: Monday, August 09, 1999 12:43 AM
> To: SANET-mg
> Subject: Old ag publications and the cost of memory
>
> 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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