USDA’s History Comes Alive at the National Agricultural Library
This colorful fiber is one of the specimens in the USDA Fiber
Collection, part of the many special collections documenting
USDA’s efforts leading up to the Department’s 150th anniversary
in 2012. The collections include correspondence, raw research
notes, images, and artifacts and provide a record of how USDA
has carried out its mission in its first 150 years. (D2553-1)
More than 100 white boxes fill shelf after shelf of the fifth
floor at the National Agricultural Library (NAL), sheltering
secrets of U.S. Department of Agriculture parasite
investigations from 1886 to 1987. The boxes are filled with line
drawings, photographs, lantern slides, research notes,
documents, and correspondence that represent the early history
of parasitology work, especially in taxonomy and systematics,
conducted over the past 100 years and more by USDA scientists.
Such records are not simply the dry dust of USDA history, but
rather a continuing resource for researcher