Born-digital agricultural resources: archives and issues

Abstract

Agricultural researchers and public users world-wide have ever-increasing access to a plethora of online resources, including "grey literature" not published in commercial or society publications. In the United States, most of the agricultural grey literature is contributed by land grant university Agricultural Experiment Station (AES) and associated Cooperative Extension Service (CES) units. Their publications and resources are often created in a digital format and presented online even when a parallel distribution option is maintained for a print or hard-copy version. While increasing the amount of free online agricultural information is critically important, many issues must be addressed to ensure that users can both easily locate and retain long-term access to this information. It is also imperative to create a user-friendly process that enables researchers, extension agents, and farmers to more easily contribute valuable digital agricultural content to online venues, while at the same time centralizing access points to enable faster, easier access by all users. Most importantly, literature being born-digital1 today must be described and archived in a manner that preserves access for searchers ten, fifty, or one hundred years from now, enabling them to learn from today's lessons rather than repeat them.