NATDP began in late 1986 with a meeting of representatives from the land-grant library community to deal with the issue of electronic information. NAL and forty-five of these libraries banded together to establish this project—to evaluate the technology for converting what were then source documents in paper form into electronic form, to provide access to that digital information, and then to distribute it. Distributing that material to the community—the university community as well as the extension service community, potentially down to the county level—constituted the group's chief concern.

Since January 1988 (when the microcomputer-based scanning system was installed at NAL), NATDP has done a variety of things, concerning which ZIDAR would provide further details. For example, the first technology considered in the project's discussion phase was digital videodisc, which indicates how long ago it was conceived.

Over the four years of this project, four separate CD-ROM products on four different agricultural topics were created, two at a scanning-and-OCR station installed at NAL, and two by service bureaus. Thus, NATDP has gained comparative information in terms of those relative costs. Each of these products contained the full ASCII text as well as page images of the material, or between 4,000 and 6,000 pages of material on these disks. Topics included aquaculture, food, agriculture and science (i.e., international agriculture and research), acid rain, and Agent Orange, which was the final product distributed (approximately eighteen months before the Workshop).

The third phase of NATDP focused on delivery mechanisms other than CD-ROM. At the suggestion of Clifford LYNCH, who was a technical consultant to the project at this point, NATDP became involved with the Internet and initiated a project with the help of North Carolina State University, in which fourteen of the land-grant university libraries are transmitting digital images over the Internet in response to interlibrary loan requests—a topic for another meeting. At this point, the pilot project had been completed for about a year and the final report would be available shortly after the Workshop. In the meantime, the project's success had led to its extension. (ANDRE noted that one of the first things done under the program title was to select a retrieval package to use with subsequent products; Windows Personal Librarian was the package of choice after a lengthy evaluation.)

Three additional products had been planned and were in progress:

1) An arrangement with the American Society of Agronomy—a professional society that has published the Agronomy Journal since about 1908—to scan and create bit-mapped images of its journal. ASA granted permission first to put and then to distribute this material in electronic form, to hold it at NAL, and to use these electronic images as a mechanism to deliver documents or print out material for patrons, among other uses. Effectively, NAL has the right to use this material in support of its program. (Significantly, this arrangement offers a potential cooperative model for working with other professional societies in agriculture to try to do the same thing—put the journals of particular interest to agriculture research into electronic form.)

2) An extension of the earlier product on aquaculture.

3) The George Washington Carver Papers—a joint project with Tuskegee University to scan and convert from microfilm some 3,500 images of Carver's papers, letters, and drawings.

It was anticipated that all of these products would appear no more than six months after the Workshop.

******