Preservation of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin in the Digital Repository

The 'Bulletin of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station' is being digitized for preservation, archived in the Texas A&M University Digital Repository, and made accessible to a worldwide audience. This bulletin series, which began publication in 1888, covers a wide variety of agricultural research reports. Subjects include grain, forage, fruit, and nut crop varieties, animal production and feeding, veterinary medicine, agricultural engineering and innovation, agricultural economics, and other information of scientific and historical value. Many bulletins contain photographs and figures with historical significance, for example, some of the first crop dusting airplanes used in 1925, and early cotton picking machinery from the 1920's.

Each page of the original print bulletin is scanned with an OpticBook 3600 book edge scanner and saved as an archival gray scale tagged image file format (TIFF) file at 400 dpi for text pages or 600 dpi for figure or illustration pages. The page images are combined into a PDF document of the pages and optical character recognition generated searchable full text. Dublin Core metadata records are created for each Bulletin and National Agricultural Library Thesaurus subject terms are added to the records. The TIFF files, PDF file, and metadata record for each Bulletin are uploaded to the Digital Repository operated by the Texas A&M University Libraries. In addition to the search functionality of the repository, the metadata records are harvestable by web crawlers and incorporated in many other web search indexes making them more discoverable worldwide. This digital content is also being created in support of a distributed effort among academic libraries to provide content for a National Digital Library for Agriculture.