Prior to World War II, America was a largely rural nation, but many of the documents that chronicle the history of rural life are drying, cracking and crumbling away on the shelves of libraries of state colleges of agriculture.

Funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is now helping to identify and preserve state and local historical literature about agriculture and rural life in the period from 1820 to 1945. Cornell University's Mann Library is directing the project, in which land-grant university libraries in 15 states are microfilming the publications.

The documents include information about life on the plantations, the abolition of slavery, westward migration, sharecropping, the arrival of European and Asian immigrants, the use of migrant workers in agriculture, Native Americans overrun by land-hungry pioneers and the clash of Anglo and Hispanic cultures in southwestern states. Researchers looking for sustainable agriculture techniques can find information on methods from the days before the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers became commonplace.

On July 1 the project will enter the second phase of an effort that began in 1996. The first phase allowed libraries in eight states to evaluate the available documents to choose those most worthy of preservation, and it allowed four schools, including Cornell, to begin microfilming their selections.

The second phase of the project, made possible by an additional $908,800 NEH grant, allows four more states to begin microfilming and another seven to begin the evaluation process. The new grant brings total NEH funding for the project to $1.75 million.

The project is directed by Wallace C. Olsen, a senior research associate at Mann Library. Phase II will begin officially at the American Library Association Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., June 26, where Olsen will conduct a workshop on identification and evaluation of the literature, and Ann Swartzell, head of preservation at Harvard University, will conduct a microfilming quality assurance workshop.

Mann Library, which serves the New York State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell, has identified and copied more than 1,800 volumes. Alabama, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin also have completed the preservation of their top priority state and local publications.

The project is unique in employing panels of experts to evaluate the available documents, using a methodology developed at Cornell.

"There is not enough money to preserve everything," explained Susan Barnes, assistant to the director of Mann Library. "Each state is focusing on preserving publications that are relevant to state and local history, and local experts are evaluating them. These rankings provide priorities to ensure that at least the top-ranked 25 percent of publications can be preserved for each participating state."

Microfilming is done according to national standards and the technical microfilming guidelines in the Preservation Microfilming Handbook published by the Research Libraries Group. Records for each item will be contributed to two national library catalog databases, the Research Libraries Information Network and the Online Computer Library Center, with a master film negative sent to the National Agricultural Library for safekeeping. Each library will keep negatives of the publications it has microfilmed, as well as positive microfilm copies for local use and for interlibrary loan.

Examples of items to be preserved at participating institutions include:

• Early publications from Franciscan missionaries who worked with Navajos and Apaches in Arizona during the 19th century;
• Publications such as The Plight of the Share-Cropper, by Norman Thomas, that reflect the difficulties of tenant farm life in Arkansas during the "dust bowl" depression-era years;
• Records of controversies over public land use, protection of endangered species, water rights and agricultural labor in California;
• Documentation of cotton plantation/slave culture, rural black communities and the draining of much of the Everglades in Florida;
• Descriptions of the growth of the Hawaiian sugar industry and its relation to the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893 (opening the way for annexation by the United States in 1898);
• Early journals that promoted scientific agriculture, such as Wallace's Farmer in Iowa;
• Details of the period when Minneapolis produced more flour than any other city in the world, as early milling companies such as General Mills and Pillsbury evolved into conglomerates;
• Contemporary information from the days of conflict between ranchers and homesteaders in Montana;
• Railroad pamphlets such as "Great Opportunities for Farmers, Businessmen, and Investors in Nebraska, Northwestern Kansas, and Eastern Colorado," which were designed to sell farmlands and to attract settlers to the new West;
• Contemporary accounts of the period when settlers from the North came to Texas looking for land, sparking cultural conflict that eventually would lead to revolution and the raising of the Lone Star flag over the Republic of Texas.