The NDSU Library will focus on North Dakota materials: published books, periodicals, pamphlets, broadsides and other materials that depict the rural history of North Dakota and Dakota Territory.  We are in the process of developing an inclusive bibliography by searching online catalog services, and scanning a selection of published bibliographies. We also need assistance in finding un-cataloged published materials that may reside in local collections.  We are identifying a broad scope of materials including such items as:

• Published bulletins, proceedings and reports from agricultural and rural societies: for instance, The Bulletin of the Better Farming Association of North Dakota, published early 1900’
• Publications by and about the Nonpartisan League or other rural political organizations; for instance, The Beginning and the End of the Nonpartisan League by Oliver Thomason in 1920, or tracts and published speeches and periodicals published by the League.
• Land company and rail road company enticements to immigration: such as Northern Pacific’s Homes for all are to be had along the lines of the Northern PacificRail Road in North Dakota : the garden of the territory and the great wheat center of the world
• Club and Society publications, such as: Western Womanhood, published in the 1890’s by the Women's Christian Temperance Union of North Dakota.
• Published reminiscences, such as Dakota, an Informal Study of Territorial Days, by Edna LaMoore Waldo in 1932, and 1936.
• Extension, Experiment Station and North Dakota documents from pertinent departments not already preserved by state microfiche projects, or other microfilming projects.
• A complete listing of the scope and subject coverage is available upon request.

Once prepared, the bibliography will be reviewed by a panel of experts to identify those items most worthy of preservation.   Microfilming will be done according to national standards; the master film negative will be sent to the National Agricultural Library for safekeeping and copies will be kept at NDSU for local use and interlibrary loan.  Duplicates of the film will be made available on a cost recovery basis.   Records for each microfilmed item will be contributed to OCLC and RLIN.

The national project, begun in 1996, is sponsored and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), under overall direction of Cornell University’s Mann Library. The eventual goal is to complete preservation in all 50 states.  So far, other states involved in this program include New York, Alabama, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, California, Florida, Nebraska, Kansas, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas, Hawaii, Montana, Arkansas, Arizona, Iowa and Minnesota.

For further information, or if you have suggestions and inclusions, please contact John Bye (phone 701-231-8877; e-mail John.Bye@ndsu.edu) or Kathie Richardson (phone 701-231-8879; e-mail Kathie.Richardson@ndsu.edu)   Further information about this project is available from our web site at www.lib.ndsu.nodak.edu/research/subjects/ag/Rural.php