The US National Agricultural Library (NAL) recently announced the prioritization of digital formats in its collection development, and its continuation of in‐house digitization of historical agricultural materials (US Department of Agriculture, 2012). The digital collection reviewed here, Organic Agriculture Information Access, is an early example of NAL's access and preservation efforts; the last update to the website occurred in June 2004. The collection makes available 186 USDA reports (published 1927‐1942, predating the common use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers), containing information considered relevant for today's organic producers. Two USDA programmes – the National Organic Program and the Sustainable Agriculture and Education Program – provided financial support for the project. The content appears to be satisfactory, despite a lack of information about selection criteria. Scans of publications examined for this review are clear, readable, and accurate.
Navigation of the collection is somewhat clumsy. The home page provides a simple search box. A hyperlink to Browse the Reports defaults to a browse by title in alphabetical order, or the choice to browse by author's last name. More useful would be a browse by topic (e.g. commodity, pest, disease). There is, unfortunately, no link to a help menu on the home page. Links to other search types are present: Basic, Proximity, Boolean, and Bibliographic. Choosing any one of these searches takes the user to another page; a tab there leads to a useful help menu (entitled Digital Texts at U‐M) that describes each search type.
For each search result, there are several options to explore. Results Detail lists the occurrences of the search terms on every page of the document. Visitors can View First Page as well. List of All Pages displays the publication's metadata and a list of its page numbers, with hyperlinks to the corresponding digital images. In addition, a user can: switch the format from image to text, view other pages in the document by clicking on directional arrows or selecting a page number from a dropdown menu, alter the scanned page's size, and perform additional searches within the text of a publication. Services for the visitor include retention of a search session's history, and a Bookbag in which to place citations of interest. From the Bookbag, one can e‐mail or download (.txt file) selected citations, or empty the Bookbag. Confusingly, Link to this Item Directly displays the same information and options as List All Pages, mentioned above.
A significant limitation to Organic Agriculture Information Access is inefficient access to the full‐text. Selecting the option to View the Entire Text presents a user with a solid unit of text, missing page breaks, and with no correction of errors from the OCR process. Alternatively, reading and/or printing the scanned page images occurs one page at a time. Printing relies on the print function of the browser. It is not possible to download and/or print an entire scanned publication. This difficulty calls into question the collection's usefulness for the target audiences of organic producers and scientists, as well as for other interested parties (e.g. agricultural historians, interested members of the public).
There is now some redundancy between this collection and Google's digitization efforts. Since all of the publications are federal government documents without typical copyright restrictions, perhaps NAL could improve on Google's efforts: for example, increase efficient discovery by including additional metadata so that topical browsing is possible within the collection, and improve full‐text access by providing downloadable PDFs of each of the 186 reports.
Despite its limitations, Organic Agriculture Information Access provides a portal for access to, and a preservation record of, agricultural research that is relevant to organic production today.
