Poultry foundation begins legacy project

14-09-2010 | Home | News

The Poultry Science Association Foundation has reached its initial fundraising goals and begun work on its Legacy Project, with the goal of making thousands of poultry-related research papers available to scientists online for the first time.

The genesis of the project, according to the Foundation, was the widely acknowledged difficulty – for researchers and students alike – of accessing back issues of Poultry Science, a scientific journal published by PSA. PSA began providing digital access to current issues of Poultry Science in 1996, so today 14 years of the journal are already available online to subscribers anywhere in the world. But issues prior to 1996 are often difficult to locate.

Because of space issues, many libraries only keep a few years of their traditional bound journals readily available in-house. The rest they move to off-site storage facilities, making access to thousands of Poultry Science articles representing decades of research, including many groundbreaking papers, much more difficult. The Legacy Project will change that, giving scientists immediate and searchable Internet access to this entire archive of invaluable work,” said Foundation President Dr. William Saylor, a professor in the Department of Animal and Food Sciences at the University of Delaware.

The Legacy Project will scan, index, and make available online more than 600 back issues of Poultry Science (1921 – 1996) and its predecessor journals, International Association of Instructors and Investigators in Poultry Husbandry Proceedings (1908 – 1912), and the Journal of the American Association of Instructors and Investigators in Poultry Husbandry (1914 – 1921).

Scanning for the project has already begun. Indexing and posting to the journal website should be completed by July 2011, in time for PSA’s annual meeting next year in St. Louis. In total, almost 17,000 articles – well over 100,000 pages of research – will be made electronically available to Poultry Science subscribers through the Legacy Project.

The Poultry Science Association Foundation is a charitable corporation affiliated with the Poultry Science Association (PSA).

Click for more information about the Legacy Project

Related website
• Poultry Science Association (PSA)