Researchers in developing countries find it frustrating trying to keep abreast of the latest agricultural research because hard currency shortages prevent the purchase of hugely expensive scientific journals. Now, Cornell's Albert R. Mann Library is offering a solution: an information source it has dubbed "library-in-a-box."

The library is a 44-pound set of 172 compact discs packed with texts of 140 agricultural and life science magazines published between 1993 and 1996, with annual updates. An outgrowth of hard work by former Mann Library Director Jan Olsen, The Essential Electronic Agricultural Literature (TEEAL) was developed by Wallace Olsen, a senior research associate at the library, who with his staff worked for 10 years to shoe-horn 735,000 pages on to the CD-ROM's. "It's a monster," says Olsen.

The boxed library, priced at $10,000, is only for sale to 104 developing countries. Olsen says that subscriptions to all 140 magazines, ranging from African Crop Science Journal to the World's Poultry Science Journal, if bought separately, would amount to $375,000. In addition, says Olsen, "we have a lot of instructional material, we have a mixture of literature." Scientific articles chosen for the CD set, he says, are broad and international in scope, and will be useful for many countries.

More than a dozen universities and research institutions in developing countries, including Zimbabwe, Indonesia and Nepal, have purchased the CD library, since shipping began in July.

The project, managed by Mann Library, was underwritten by a $900,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

TEEAL had to clear years of hurdles, including about five years of negotiations to gain the cooperation of the world's leading scholarly journals on agricultural and life sciences to assemble the collection. Olsen spent considerable time negotiating copyright agreements and convincing publishers that distributing back issues of their journals to developing countries would not hurt potential subscription sales. Library-in-a-box sales are restricted to those developing countries where publishers normally would not find a market for their journals.

"Cooperation of publishers was essential to our success," says Olsen. "They provided access to their journals and generously waived copyright royalties to assist in advancing agricultural self-sufficiency in developing countries."

Once the journals were digitized and the orders came in, there were still problems securing payment and making deliveries. One Asian purchaser mailed 17 separate checks to Ithaca in order to clear government restrictions on hard-currency outflows. And an African country demanded that the 44-pound package be inspected by a government representative before it could leave a Syracuse mail-delivery office. However, the representative failed to appear.

Despite these problems, TEEAL has successfully shipped 16 sets, with 14 additional orders awaiting final funding. These customers also will also be able to order the updated CD's with issues of magazines published since 1996. Mann Library hopes eventually to have orders from all 104 countries.

For further information about TEEAL, contact the TEEAL Office at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14853 USA. You may also send e-mail to teeal@mannlib.cornell.edu and reach them by phone at 607-255-8939. The project's web site may be found at: http://teeal.cornell.edu.