Preservation of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin in the Digital Repository

Abstract

To assist agricultural librarians in their new role as digital preservation and distribution specialists, this article documents the basic procedures for scanning and digitizing print agricultural serial publications and submitting them to a DSpace digital repository, through a case study of a project at Texas A&M University Libraries to digitize Texas Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletins. It is hoped that a dispersed network of similar agricultural materials in all the various land grant university digital repositories could be crawled to harvest the metadata records and make them accessible in a central user-friendly digital library for agriculture.

KEYTERMS:

• agricultural information
• archival preservation
• digital repository
• digitization
• open access
• Texas A&M University

This project, “Digitization of Texas Agricultural Agency Publications in Support of Development of the National Digital Library for Agriculture,” was funded, in part, by USDA, ARS, National Agricultural Library Specific Cooperative Agreement 58-8021-4-195, and by the Texas A&M University Libraries.