DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. Periodicals. Hon. MARCUS A. SMITH, DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, Chairman Joint Committee on Printing. SIR: In compliance with the request of the Joint Committee on Printing, of date of March 12, I have the honor to submit information concerning the periodical publications of the Department of Agriculture, and to recommend that the Joint Committee on Printing authorize their continued publication until the close of the next regular session of Congress, and that thereafter the Congress authorize their publication. WEEKLY NEWS LETTER. 1. Name of publication: Weekly News Letter. 2. Issued weekly. 3. Issued by the Department of Agriculture, Office of Information. 4. Authorized by act of March 2, 1895, section 89 (proviso). 5. Date of first issue: August 13, 1913. 6. Printed at Government Printing Office. 7. Number of copies printed of last issue: 142,000. 8. Distributed as follows: (a) Official: Employees and official cooperators of the department, 128,447. (b) Free public, 13,258; Agricultural journals and publications interested in agriculture, including 10,258 country weeklies and 440 dailies, the latter at their special request. (e) Subscriptions, 295. 9. Annual receipts from subscriptions: $147.50, made to superintendent of public documents. 10. Annual expense of printing and issuing: Volume V (52 numbers), $41,698.59; average cost per issue, Volume VI, $1,211. 11. Annual cost of preparing publication for printing: It is impossible to give a satisfactory estimate of this cost, since the work of preparing the material for the News Letter is only a part of the duties of individuals in the Office of Information and of various contributors throughout the department. 12. Total annual cost of publication: See paragraph 10. 13. Printed at Government Printing Office. 14. Publication is not a duplication of any other publication. 127641-19-2 17 15. The Weekly News Letter is the only means the Department of Agriculture has for informing the large army of agricultural workers-Federal and State-of new plans, new facts, and current progress in their activities. In that sense it is a house organ. It carries to these workers, in popular form, the latest results of the department's investigation and research and presents campaign plans of production, conservation, marketing, and other projects. In another and as important a capacity the News Letter is an information service to the press, especially agricultural journals. Its contents are widely reprinted and serve in an important way to further National and State efforts in behalf of better farms and better homes. In addition to the agricultural, trade, and weekly press, the News Letter is sent to 440 daily newspapers at their own request. Although we are convinced by the large number of applicants that the circulation of the Weekly News Letter could be greatly enlarged, possibly to millions, it is limited to about 140.000 by the funds for its publication, and because we believe it unwise to allow it to compete with agricultural journals. The New Letter, therefore, does not make direct communication between the department. and American farmers-except those who receive it as official cooperators-but carries agricultural information to the distributing points the press and agricultural leaders. Its circulation, then, includes only Federal and State agricultural workers, cooperators, and the press. Its cost, averaging about $1,200 an issue, is believed to be insignificant in comparison with the purpose served and the results. EXPERIMENT STATION RECORD. 1. Name of publication: Experiment Station Record, an abstract journal reviewing the world's literature on agricultural experimentation and research. 2. Issued monthly with supplementary numbers every two months. 3. Issued by the Department of Agriculture, Office of Experiment Stations of the States Relations Service. 4. Authorized by the act of March 2, 1895. From time to time the annual agricultural appropriation act has carried reference to the Record and it has been described before the agricultural committees. of Congress on several occasions. It was specifically mentioned in the list of publications to be authorized under the bill for amending the laws relating to public printing submitted in 1916, which was favorably reported upon by the committees on printing of both branches of Congress, but was not acted upon. 5. Date of first issue: September, 1889. 6. Printed at the Government Printing Office. 7. Present edition is 7,500 copies. 8. The distribution of the Record is closely restricted to a selected list of libraries, foreign exchanges, persons connected with this department, the agricultural colleges and experiment stations, agricultural schools, certain officials connected with the State governments, and to a quite limited extent to official institutions in foreign countries. There is no general free distribution to the public. The entire edition is distributed in the manner described except a small surplus used by the superintendent of documents and to supply occasional requests for separate numbers. 9. The superintendent of documents reports the receipts for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1918, as $599.30 for subscriptions, and $47.80 for the sale of single copies. 10. The cost of printing the Record for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1918, is $15,120.29. 11. Annual cost of preparing the Record for publication, including salaries, etc., is calculated at $23,100. 12. The total annual cost of publication, including preparation and printing as shown in the two preceding items, is approximately $38.220.29. For the edition of 7,500 copies this is equivalent to an average cost of $5 a year or $2.50 per volume (two volumes being issued annually). For comparison it may be stated that the price of the leading abstract journals of science in the English language, relating to botany, chemistry, physiology, etc., ranges from $5 to $15 per volume. (Abstracts of Bacteriology, $5 per volume; Botanical Abstracts, $6 a year; Physiological Abstracts, $6.50; Chemical Abstracts, $6; Journal of the Chemical Society (London)-almost entirely abstracts-$15.) 13. Published at Government Printing Office. 14. The Record does not duplicate in whole or in part any other Government publication. 15. The Record is the means by which agricultural investigators in the experiment stations and the Department of Agriculture, teachers in agricultural colleges and schools, and experts connected with the State departments of agriculture, boards of health, and other official agencies are enabled to keep posted on the extensive and widely scattered literature relating to the world's progress in agricultural experiment and investigation. The Record was begun soon after the passage of the Hatch Act (Mar. 2, 1887), providing for the establishment and maintenance of agricultural experiment stations in every State and Territory. That act assigned to the Department of Agriculture certain duties in connection with the development of the station system, among which were the suggestion of lines of inquiry and "such advice and assistance as will best promote the purposes of this act." The need for reviews of the work being done by experiment stations and other agencies for agricultural investigation in this country and abroad early became apparent, due to the quite limited library facilities of most of the agricultural colleges and stations and to the fact that the work published in foreign languages was largely sealed to many workers, who either did not have access to the literature or did not know the languages in which much of the material was published. Furthermore, the great volume and the widely scattered character of this literature made it quite impracticable for the busy specialists to follow it in detail. This difficulty is very much greater at the present time because of the very great increase in the variety and extent of such literature. Originally established with the needs of the experiment stations and the recording of their activities primarily in mind, the Record soon came to be utilized and depended upon largely by the investigators in this department and by a broadening range of agricultural workers, including teachers, experts in official positions, and more recently the agricultural extension service. It is the standard periodical of its kind in the English language. Indeed, there is no other abstract journal devoted to progress in agricultural science and practice comparable with the Record in scope and completeness published anywhere in the world. Without the Record the agricultural colleges, the experiment stations, the department bureaus, and other institutions depending upon it would be obliged to make abstracts and indexes of the literature relating to their special field of work in order to keep their knowledge up to date. This would be an expensive and wasteful effort. What the following of this literature would involve is shown by the scope of the Record's review: In the past fiscal year the Department of Agriculture issued 985 new publications, aggregating about 30,000 pages; and 60 American experiment stations published 1,624 new bulletins, circulars, and annual reports containing a total of 28.109 pages. There are over a thousand experiment stations in foreign countries whose publications contain much of interest to us in this country. Aside from the above, 1,752 different scientific periodicals were reviewed and abstracted regularly last year as their numbers appeared, and in addition several thousand books, pamphlets, annuals, and serials issued irregularly. These publications represented 10 different languages besides English. Each year between 7,000 and 8,000 abstracts are published in the Record. The value of the Record finds analogies in such works as Index Medicus and the legal journals reporting and indexing decisions and proceedings of permanent interest. Like these it occupies a definite. field and it assembles material from widely scattered sources otherwise largely inaccessible to the general reader. JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH. 1. Name of publication: Journal of Agricultural Research. 2. Issued from October 10, 1913; to September 15, 1915, monthly; from October 4, 1915, to April 1, 1919, weekly; after April 1, 1919, monthly. 3. Issued by the Department of Agriculture, through an editorial committee consisting of Dr. K. F. Kellerman, chairman, Associate Chief, Bureau of Plant Industry, Department of Agriculture; Mr. C. L. Marlatt, Assistant Chief, Bureau of Entomology, Department of Agriculture: Dr. E. W. Allen, Chief, Office of Experiment Stations, States Relations Service: Dr. H. P. Armsby, director Institute of Animal Nutrition, State College of Pennsylvania, State College, Pa.; Dr. J. P. Lipman, director New Brunswick Experiment Station, New Brunswick, N. J.; Dr. W. A. Riley, chief, division of entomology and economic zoology, Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station, University Farm, St. Paul, Minn. (The first-named three men were appointed from the department; the last-named men by the executive committee of the agricultural colleges and experiment stations for the experiment stations.) 4. Authorized by act of March 2, 1895. 5. Date of first issue: October 10, 1913. |