Contact: Maridith Geuder
STARKVILLE, Miss.--The diaries, letters, photographs, maps, ledgers, and other documentation of the South's agricultural past will be part of Mississippi State University's contribution to a national network that provides information about food, agriculture and the environment.
The university's Mitchell Memorial Library has been accepted for membership in the Agricultural Network Information Center, an online consortium of universities, libraries and professional organizations founded in 1995 at Iowa State University and now based in Beltville, Md.
Partners in the 10-year-old network, often referred to as AgNIC, provide publicly accessible information, news and calendar items to users around the globe. AgNIC Web sites receive nearly 1 million hits each year.
"This is a one-stop information resource about subjects that range from chili peppers to agricultural law," said Frances N. Coleman, MSU dean of libraries. Members include major land-grant universities, as well as organizations such as the American Society for Horticultural Science and the National Agricultural Library, which hosts AgNIC.
As a new member of AgNIC, Mississippi State will "serve as the coordinating institution for a broader initiative to create a site on Southern regional agricultural history and rural life," said Melanie Gardner, AgNIC coordinator.
"This is a perfect fit for our institution," said Vance Watson, vice president for agriculture, forestry and veterinary medicine, noting that a variety of campus units in 2002 came together to establish the Consortium for the History of Agricultural and Rural Mississippi, or CHARM.
"Through this program, we have been successful in establishing and enlarging collections of historical materials that are unique, irreplaceable and of great value to scholars of rural and agricultural history," he said.
CHARM initiatives include collecting and cataloguing original documents and artifacts, creating an ongoing oral history program, and providing Internet access to a growing proportion of the materials.
Among documents and artifacts included in the collection are nearly 300 handwritten scripts and 17,000 photographic negatives from the 1954-61 television feature, "Farm Family of the Week," produced by WLBT-TV in Jackson; diaries of farmers; business ledgers, deeds and other records; and correspondence.
CHARM collaborators include the MSU Libraries; the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station; the MSU Extension Service; and the colleges of veterinary medicine, forest resources, and agriculture and life sciences.
"We believe the MSU model can very successfully be translated to a national model that will benefit thousands of scholars," Coleman said.
For more information about CHARM, see http://library.msstate.edu/charm/.
For more info about AgNIC, see http://www.agnic.org/agnic/index_html.
For more information, telephone Coleman at 662-325-7661.