Cornell's Mann Library will soon give agriculture researchers and students in developing countries access to a wealth of technical information they need to increase food production.

Mann Library, which supports Cornell's colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and of Human Ecology, will scan and digitize the entire contents of the last five years of 125 selected agriculture journals and store them on a set of 60 CD-ROMs. The result, known as The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library, or TEEAL, will be made available to libraries in 111 of the lowest-income food-deficit countries, as listed in the World Bank's 1996 World Development Report.

The initial basic set of CD-ROMs will hold scanned images of some 675,000 pages with all illustrations and diagrams, including some color and gray-scale images.

The project will be funded initially by a $950,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

"This project has the ability to change the quality of research and instruction in developing countries more than almost any other," said Robert Herdt '61, senior agricultural officer at the Rockefeller Foundation.

The idea originated with Wallace C. Olsen, a senior research associate at Mann Library, who will manage the project, and Jan Olsen, former director of Mann Library and now vice president for external affairs of Wells College in Aurora. Both have traveled extensively in developing countries in support of agricultural development projects. Wallace Olsen was formerly deputy director of the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Md., and has worked with the U. S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank. Jan Olsen has worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Rockefeller Foundation.

On their travels, they clearly saw the need to make technical information more readily available to researchers in those countries, Wallace Olsen said, but it was only about 10 years ago that the technology to do so effectively became available.

Editors: Wallace C. Olsen, the project director, can be reached at (607) 255-8939 or WCO1@cornell.edu.

"There have been a variety of book and journal distribution programs over the years, but nobody ever organized the material when it got there," he said. "I'd go to a struggling library in South America and see the books sitting in the corner."

Worse, he added, books and journals printed on paper don't hold up well in countries where libraries lack the climate control that most of us take for granted. Between heat, dust and mildew, he said, paper can deteriorate badly over just five years. "Computers are almost immune to that these days," he said, "and you can build a box around one if you have a problem."

One of the things that makes the project practical, he said, is that while developing nations may not have elaborate libraries, most now have computers capable of reading CD-ROMs.

The CD-ROM library will include an index and searching tools so that users can find articles they need by entering keywords. Libraries that receive the set will not have to do any shelving or indexing, as they would with hard copy journals. As an added advantage, Olsen said, CD-ROMs are less likely to be stolen than printed journals.

The 125 journals to be included in the electronic library have been selected on the basis of a citation analysis previously done by Mann Library to identify the most valuable publications. About 300 teachers and researchers in developing countries were then asked to vote on which journals on the most-cited list they would like to have available.

Olsen and his staff have spent about six months obtaining copyright clearances from the publishers of the journals. "We're very appreciative of their willingness to cooperate with us," Olsen said. They agreed, he said, as long as distribution is limited to developing countries.

Most of the publishers are supplying new copies of their journals for the project, a big plus because the journals must be taken apart for page-by-page scanning. But where new copies aren't available, Mann Library will draw on its own extensive collection. The library will contract out the actual scanning work, Olsen said.

The Rockefeller Grant will finance the production of the first set of CD-ROMs containing journals from 1993 through 1996. After that, the project will support itself by selling the CD-ROM sets at $10,000 for the basic set, which is about 10 percent of the cost of buying the actual journals for one year, Olsen said. About half of the libraries contacted will be able to afford to buy the sets themselves, and arrangements are being made to help others obtain funding through institutions such as UNESCO and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, he said,.

The sales receipts will pay Cornell in advance for producing annual updates containing the latest volume of each journal. Annual updates are planned for the next 10 years, after which Internet access to journals is expected to be available in many developing countries.

The TEEAL Steering Committee, which held its first meeting in New York City in December 1997, includes W. Ronnie Coffman (Cornell University), Carl K. Eicher (Michigan State University), Gebisa Ejeta (Purdue University), Curtis Farrar (a former director of the International Food Policy and Research Institute), Carl H. Gotsch (Stanford University), Robert W. Herdt (Rockefeller Foundation), Jan Olsen (Wells College), Roy Steiner (Africa Online) and Aboubacar Toure (Texas Technical University), Janet McCue, acting director of Mann Library, is the principal investigator for the TEEAL project.