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NAL Digital Conversion Project

In an effort to meet current and future user needs, the National Agricultural Library (NAL) announced a new collection policy which encouraged the collection of digital materials over paper and the intention to provide digital access to legacy materials through conversion projects conducted in partnership with users and their representative professional organizations.

Libraries have traditionally provided society with the means to preserve knowledge. Today, if we intend to preserve information in a digital format, we must also ensure that future generations will continue to have access despite technological changes in both hardware and software. The long-term solution to the preservation dilemma is to collect the digital information in a universally accepted international standard format (SGML, Standard Generalized Mark-Up Language). In this way, as technology changes, the basic information would remain accessible, independent of specialized hardware or software.

This is a unusual opportunity for the Library to directly interact and to develop a product that best meets the Bean Improvement Cooperative benefits through preservation and improved access to information for the its members and users worldwide.

NAL in cooperation with the Bean Improvement Cooperative (BIC) has converted 39 volumes of annual reports and accompanying indexes (1957-1996) as well as 4 Conference Proceedings of the Cooperative to the SGML format. This constitutes nearly 5,000 pages of text.

SGML text is more extensively encoded than HTML to allow:

• more extensive and varied formatting
• easier navigation of long documents
• searching for specific terms or terms within structural elements
• a standard and stable structural format for archiving
  

For more info on SGML see XML Cover Pages. The XML Cover Pages is a comprehensive online reference work for the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and its parent, the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).

SGML is not suported by standard WWW browsers.

View the volumes below from Netscape or Explorer after downloading and configuring an SGML browser.