NCSU Libraries Focus Online

Volume 24 number 1 - Fall 2003

Editor's Note: This article was adapted from an essay that won the 2003 U.S. Agricultural Information Network Conference Scholarship.

Contemporary challenges facing agricultural information parallel those facing agricultural research and practice. Agriculture today must feed a growing population in a world of static or shrinking natural resources and increasing social and environmental constraints. Agricultural information professionals similarly must support agriculture by managing and improving access to a proliferating and increasingly complex array of information resources in a climate of shrinking resources and expanding constraints. Yet both fields have access to powerful resources and technologies. This article describes three major issues facing agricultural research and information--preservation, technology, and diversity--and highlights some of the ways the NCSU Libraries is dealing with them.

Preservation

First is preserving the past, whether in the form of wild relatives of domesticated crops, early farming practices, or original agricultural publications. Agriculture helps preserve the past through seed banks, living plant collections, and germ-plasm collections. Similarly, agricultural information is often preserved in archives or by conversion to other formats. The NCSU Libraries' Preservation Department is participating in two collaborative projects to preserve agricultural information. The library's historic entomology collection will be microfilmed as part of the SOLINET Cooperative Preservation Microfilming project. The Libraries has also received a grant to microfilm rural agricultural material related to the history of agriculture in North Carolina.

Technology

The second issue facing agricultural research and information is the rapid growth of technology, whether biotechnology or information technology. Technological advances create new challenges for understanding and managing information and often require new skills and infrastructure. The NCSU Libraries is actively involved in several projects using technology to improve access to agriculture, forestry, and entomology information. As a member of AgNIC (Agriculture Network Information Center), the Libraries works in collaboration with NC State's Department of Entomology to maintain a Web site named Systematic Entomology: A Guide to Online Insect Systematic Resources. The site features cutting-edge technology, a quality selection of resources, and an online reference service. AgNIC is a collaborative effort between the U.S. Department of Agriculture/National Agricultural Library and an alliance of land-grant universities to provide a network of subject-based electronic resource collections.

The Libraries is also involved in digitizing two major collections. The Metcalf project will create a Web-accessible bibliographic database of the early literature for several insect superfamilies. Zeno P. Metcalf was the head of the NC State entomology and zoology departments from 1912 to 1950. One of his many achievements was the development of a comprehensive bibliography (through 1955) of the order Homoptera. This project uses technology to preserve a collection while improving access to key print and graphic resources. In cooperation with Elisabeth Wheeler, professor emeritus of wood and paper science at NCSU, the Libraries recently received a National Science Foundation grant to develop InsideWood, an extensive Web-accessible database for wood anatomy and identification resources. This tool will make available images of specimens and photographs from NC State's extensive wood collections.

Diversity

The third issue is diversity. Agriculture practice and research are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary while serving widely diverse populations. Agricultural information experiences a high level of diversity, too, in content, format, technology, audiences, and services.

Models and Metaphors

Understanding the central models and metaphors of a profession helps information professionals in two ways. First, it provides insight into the thought processes of users, which leads to better understanding of their information needs. Second, thinking metaphorically and abstractly offers fresh perspectives on the profession and sparks new insights and practices.

Genes and genetic information are central metaphors in modern agriculture. Agriculture, from its primitive beginnings to contemporary achievements in breeding and biotechnology, has relied on the same essential information source, the gene. What has changed is that understanding and manipulation of genetic information is occurring at ever-increasing levels of sophistication, technological skill, and potential for impact. Developments in agricultural information parallel these trends.

Another powerful metaphor is genetic diversity and how it connects the past with the present. Biotechnology requires a variety of genetic information as a source of new genes and traits. Because modern agriculture relies on a relatively small and uniform collection of plants, with a correspondingly limited collection of genes, diversity must be found outside of contemporary agricultural species. Wild species from which domestic crops originated provide a pool of genetic diversity essential to biotechnology. The place where a species originated sometimes contains numerous wild progenitors and is referred to as a center of diversity. The preservation of genetic diversity is essential to many aspects of agriculture today. Likewise, information and ideas from the past contribute to the development of new knowledge. Agricultural information specialists must preserve and make accessible the wide diversity of agricultural information, thereby creating centers of information diversity while developing systems to handle new types of agricultural information. The NCSU Libraries--with its strong historical and electronic collections and its development and adoption of services and technologies to enhance access to these collections--is meeting the challenge of becoming a center of information diversity for agriculture and allied fields.