Susan Garbarino, Librarian Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics, University of California, Berkeley USAIN conference 2008, Wooster, Ohio

Preservation of rare USDA data, or How I learned to stop worrying and love microfilm.

Content of the collection Historical price data of fruits, vegetables and specialty crops. Collected by the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service, Federal State Market News Service. Daily, weekly, monthly and annual fruit & vegetable prices in various cities in the United States.

Outline of the problem: Rare: no other libraries owned such a complete set. 80 years of data: Massive size of the collection: ~1600 reels of microfilm, 3000 pages per reel = 4.8 million pages. The format: most of the data was on acetate, non-archival quality microfilm which was deteriorating. – microdots; losing data – brittle film; breaking

Two faculty were interested in using this data for a research project... Major grant from USDA/Giannini Foundation to study vertical/horizontal integration of fruit and vegetable prices 18 students hired to collect price data from the film—very heavy use for this collection Clearly, this was important data worth preserving

Needed to preserve the data and make it usable Digitization not an option yet – wouldn’t preserve the content – difficult to digitize from film – size of the collection is so large: digitization done by the page rather than the reel – originals were typed on “onion skin” paper, so difficult to read the digitized (pdf) versions – just too expensive: $500 per reel (2003 estimate)

Answer: Joint grant from USDA/ Giannini Foundation to put the data onto archival polyester silver halide microfilm Funding obtained from USDA first, then Giannini Foundation—thank you AERO! Film the best option for preservation given that the data was currently on film Preserving film was ~16x less expensive than digitization (2003 figures) With funds from the faculty grant, we purchased a new reader/printer/scanner, so we can digitize pages on demand

Timeline: or patience is a virtue I began working at Giannini and was informed of the need to preserve this rare collection Faculty told me they were interested in using this data; we digitized a sample reel and realized we needed to duplicate the film instead I asked the Giannini Foundation for funding for preservation of the film, but was turned down At the AERO conference at NAL I met Charles Parrot from USDA, FSMNS division. I told him we had this data and wanted to preserve it I received grant from USDA for ½ of the project funding. I then approached the Giannini Foundation again and this time they said yes. 2006/2007- I completed the project. Selected BMI as our vendor since they were local.

Sample of the data

The FVMN website has some of this type of data: