Project Harvest

In December 2000, in response to a call from the Mellon Foundation, the Cornell University Library received a grant to develop a plan for a repository of electronic journals in the field of agriculture. The Mellon Foundation recognized that solutions to the problem or preserving electronic journals can only be solved if done in cooperation with the publishers. From January 2001 through March 2002 the Cornell Mellon teamed worked together and with the project teams from the other Mellon planning grant recipients to deepen our knowledge of the digital archiving problems.

Project Harvest, as the project came to be known, built on Cornell’s historic excellence in preservation in general and the preservation of agricultural literature in particular. During the course of the year we initiated a dialogue with a number of agriculture publishers with whom we have successfully cooperated on other projects. We sought to explore the conditions under which a publisher might be willing to participate in a subject-based repository. In addition, we surveyed specialists in the field of agricultural preservation in order to determine the requirements of librarians for digital archives. Finally, we spent much of the year exploring potential business models for a successful digital repository. The Final Report of the project is available here [.pdf, 260KB]: <http://www.library.cornell.edu/harvest/Final-Report.pdf>

One of the general conclusions we reached was that it was very difficult for an individual library to build a business plan that could justify building and maintaining an e-journal archive. Focus shifted instead to doing this in a collaborative fashion, with special emphasis on the role that JSTOR might be able to play. As a result, the Mellon Foundation has decided to continue the e-journal archiving initiative under the auspices of JSTOR. You can find more on this development at: <http://www.jstor.org/news/2002.09/EarchivingBornDigitalContent.html>