Nan Hyland, Nate Rupp and John Fereira will discuss the efforts being made to redesign the USDA Economics, Statistics, and Market Information System (ESMIS).

Nan will address the history of the ESMIS, the agencies involved, the need for redesign and the future of the system. Nate will speak on the metadata and workflow schemes for the new system. John will describe programmatic innovations developed to integrate disparate pieces into the new system.

The ESMIS is the product of a dynamic partnership between Mann Library and the economic agencies of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to provide the public with fast and free electronic access to vital agricultural information via the Internet. These materials cover U.S. and international agriculture and related topics. Mann Library has disseminated these reports and datasets for the past ten years. The current system is available at http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu, from which over three million documents are downloaded or e-mailed per year.

At the present time, information from four USDA agencies is available: the World Agricultural Outlook Board (WAOB), the Economic Research Service (ERS), the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), and the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS). Mann Library is also in the process of negotiating with the Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) to include its data in the ESMIS. In addition, Mann Library has taken on the task of digitizing and disseminating all historical NASS documents, dating back to the 19th century. These documents will be made available at the USDA ESMIS within the next two years.

Nan Hyland is the project manager for the ESMIS redesign effort and also serves as the liaison the the USDA. She is the head of reference and information services at Mann Library. Before taking on these duties, Nan served as Mann's GIS librarian. Before completing her degree in Library Science in 1997, she worked in the Information Technology office of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Illinois.

Nate Rupp is the electronic resources librarian in the Electronic Resources and Serials Management Division of Cornell University Library. He has worked on a number of digital library projects in addition to the USDA ESMIS, including the Home Economics Archive (HEARTH). He has a BA in history and MLIS in library and information science.

John Fereira is a senior research programmer at Mann Library.