School Gardening Documents of the Early

20th Century: A Digitization Journey

That Keeps Flourishing Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries

Seattle, Wash., May 19, 2010

by Suzi TeghtmeyerLibrarian, Michigan State

University Libraries

The Spark and Idea

• Spring 2009 – school gardening query via email

• Discovered the simply-bound Board of Education - United States School Garden Army documents and School-Rural garden documents on shelf

• Realized they were not digitized anywhere, and poorly cataloged in WorldCat with few holdings.

• Discovered LOC’s Constance Carter’s School gardens website

Planning and Digitization

• Approached boss with the idea of scanning the documents and putting them online through our digitization site and a research guide using LibGuides.

• Drew up a proposal for digitization of documents for in-house DMC.

• Was approved, but with a time delay.

• Visited NAL, was able to get more docs there digitized.

Creation of site

• Began using LibGuides program in July 2009 to link to newly digitized documents and other online materials

• Used tabs at the top and boxes within a tabbed page to organized the information and links

• Initial tab introduces site and content

School Gardening homepage

Lib of Congress, C. Carter’s site

LOC’s site, more links

LOC Bibliography

USSGA tab and links

http://discover.lib.msu.edu/iii/cpro/DigitalItemViewPage.external?lang=eng&sp=1017707&sp=T&suite=def

DMC School Gardens Site

http://discover.lib.msu.edu/iii/cpro/app?id=6884266813219441&lang=eng&service=blob&suite=def

Bureau of Education Documents

School Home – Garden Circ 6

Other Early Works

National defense gardening conference

National Resources, Assoc.

USDA - Gardening with Children

Michigan Resources

Images

Images - Photographs

Contacts Made

• Called MSU Extension and have started talking and connecting with statewide agents who work with schools and gardens.

• Called Constance Carder at LOC and she was thrilled with the site and resources and told me to call others

More Content

• So far NAL has digitized the initial two documents and two more on school gardening; total of four

• Continue to find older documents already online and link to them

• I have submitted a list of 8 more docs to DMC to digitize; to be done this summer

Future plans• Continue to add pre-1923 and other

copyright free content• Add additional content from websites• Add Michigan curriculum information

as it becomes available• Add a bibliography of materials that

help teachers learn gardening and teaching it

• Consider name-change• Add more state based curricular

material for other states• Take the site national as an AgNIC

cooperative site

Questions?

Thank you

http://libguides.lib.msu.edu/SchoolGardens