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>> Michelle Holschuh Simmons: All right.
I am so happy to be here.
I am Michelle Holschuh Simmons.
From the participants' window, I can see that I know lots of you.
And I'm totally delighted to have all of you here,
and I'm also delighted to have Bill Musser here.
Bill and I actually went to library school together in, let's see, 1999 and 2000,
and then he and I worked together at Cornell College while I was a librarian
in Cornell College and he was working in tech services.
So then afterwards, he also worked at Luther College in Iowa, and now he is the librarian
at Seed Savers Exchange, which is a nongovernmental organization dedicated
to the preservation of heirloom seeds.
And I know that Bill has lots of fabulous information to share with all of you,
and so if we can all welcome Bill with a very quiet but rousing round of applause, please.
And without further ado, I think I'm going to turn the mike over to Bill.
Bill, welcome.
>> Bill Musser: Thank you very much, Michelle, and it's very nice for me
to be here sharing with you today.
So thank you.
Thank you, Michelle, and thanks to, also to Bill Fisher and Lori Bell and Randy Cheng,
the mastermind of technology there, for both extending the invitation and helping me prepare
for today's colloquium presentation.
This morning, I received a message from the head
of the Seed Savers Exchange membership department.
He is an SJSU alum who heard I was presenting for SJSU today, and he instructed me
to relay a message, although he asked me not to mention his name
since he might still have a restraining order involving the mascot
and a missing article, he said.
The message is this: Go, Spartans!
So there it is.
I feel like [inaudible] and the alum's name, by the way, is Abe Mendez.
I'm sure he deserves whatever he gets.
In any case, thank you, SJSU, for having me.
Librarianship is a natural profession for people who are lifelong learners,
passionate about knowledge, period.
They may have very specific passions about certain subjects,
and that might make the prospect of work in a small research library attractive,
especially if it relates to one of those subjects.
What I've discovered, however, is that anyone who gets passionate
about learning can acquire both an interest and a good facility in a subject
and find a professional niche in a small research library
where you might do what you love, learn to love what you do,
and always be learning from the context of your work.
I've worked professionally in both public and academic libraries, and I've now settled
into the world of a special library, one I'll be sharing
with you more in this next half hour or so.
The American Library Directory includes listings for 3,537 special libraries,
and those libraries are affiliated with diverser organizations ranging from AARP at the A's
to the Zoological Society of San Diego in the Z's and from very small libraries,
like the Norwegian-American Museum library here in Decorah, Iowa, where I live,
to the well-known, like the Huntington Library in California
and the Metropolitan Opera Archives in New York.
Many of the libraries listed serve nonprofit organizations, associations, clubs, foundations,
institutes, societies, and they all have missions of some sort,
an intention to save a piece of the world in some small or grand way.
Some of those missions might parallel your own passion.
Others might inspire you to become passionate about something you weren't previously aware of.
Working in the context of a special research library gives me the satisfaction of knowing
that I'm participating in something I care about and a lot of other people care about, as well.
Libraries are good places to do that in general.
Working in a special library, especially as a solo librarian, demands a lot of tools
that you need to assemble in your years of LIS professional training and supplement
with experience in different realms of librarianship.
My other duties as assigned have included grant writing and marketing, as well as trademark
and copyright registration for the organization.
The more varied your experience, the more flexible you can be,
the more you gain credibility and facility in managing the library.
In a small special library, particularly as a solo librarian, again,
my position might best be described by this wonderful Latin word "factotum."
One of my undergraduate majors was in classics, and when I discovered that word "factotum,"
I thought it would be worth putting in my back pocket, figuring it would come in handy.
And I've actually even included it in resumes from time to time.
It describes in a word a position in which you do a little bit
or sometimes a lot of everything.
And that is certainly the case for a solo librarian in a small research library.
[ Pause ]
I like to think of information work as reflective
of how we are historically wired to fulfill basic human needs.
As a librarian in a research setting, I often assume the role of a hunter looking
for a specific answer to a specific question driven by a goal of getting that answer,
and at the same time I work with diverse resources every day, gathering little tidbits
of information that feed us, that give us a stronger sense of the web
of information connections that hold together the subject area in which I especially work.
On a little higher level and functioning in a more deliberate, formal way,
I'm an information farmer growing a knowledgebase of documents and reference files
from working with staff and researchers.
I draw from those resources to produce an article, an exhibition, a publication, or,
on a smaller scale, a Facebook page entry for both my library and city organization.
To farm, you have to stay in one place, you have to learn the lay of the land,
figure out which crops work and which don't, know something of the history of the place,
know what techniques work best in your local setting.
For me to be successful as a research librarian in a special library,
I have needed to really get to know the context of the parent organization.
Whether I'm information hunting, gathering, or farming, context is the key.
And that brings me to my own workplace, a case study, as it were.
A relatively small research library that is part of an organization called
"Seed Savers Exchange" located near Decorah, Iowa.
The story of Seed Savers begins with a gift of seeds given to Diane Ott Whealy.
She was a farm girl from northeast Iowa.
And those seeds were given to her by her grandfather, Baptist John Ott,
who was terminally ill at the time and shortly thereafter passed away.
These seeds have been passed on to -- had been passed on to him by his parents,
German immigrants from Bavaria who settled not far
from Decorah in St. Lucas, Iowa in the 1870s.
The seeds were for a German pink tomato and a morning glory that came
to be known as Grandpa Ott's Morning Glory.
This precious gift of heirloom seeds prompted Diane Ott Whealy and her husband, Kent,
to create a network for gardeners in 1975 to save
and share their heirloom varieties of open-pollinated garden seeds.
And at first, this organization called itself the "True Seed Exchange" and was incorporated
in Missouri, where they were living at the time.
Four years later, the name was changed to "Seed Savers Exchange."
Now, I'm going to stop right here and offer you a little bit of a botany lesson before going on.
There are a couple of definitions you should know in order to understand what we're doing
at Seed Savers Exchange, and practically all my research relates to these two terms.
You all probably have a sense for what the word "hybrid" means,
a mixing of two different kinds of something or other.
Hybrid plants have been cross-pollinated, either naturally or manually,
to produce certain desirable characteristics in the offspring.
But that only goes for one generation of the plants.
You can't take the seed from the offspring of a hybrid and be sure
of getting those same characteristics in another generation.
Open-pollinated varieties produce what we call "true seed," and that is seed
that will reliably produce the same characteristics as the parent plant.
And then there's the term "heirloom."
What constitutes an heirloom variety?
Some would say that a variety has to have been passed down for 50
to a 100 years to be considered an heirloom.
We don't have an official standard yet for determining
that here at SSE, at Seed Savers Exchange.
And I'll say "SSE," I guess, once in a while here.
So SSE stands for Seed Savers Exchange.
We're working on that, but Seed Savers defines an heirloom variety
as simply having a long history of being passed down in a group or family,
no numbers attached to that long history.
I was able to document the first use in print of the word "heirloom" in connection
with a plant variety in a 1947 seed catalog I'll share with you a little later.
And the joy of that discovery for me was being able to send an e-mail
to the Oxford English Dictionary editors to correct their citation of first use,
which was listed significantly later than this one.
And there's nothing like correcting the OED to make a librarian smile in self-righteous glee.
So back to the story of Seed Savers.
In 1986, the Whealys began seeking a new home for the organization.
They went looking for paradise and found it in the scenic, wooded,
bluff country of northeast Iowa, not far from where Diane grew up.
With some financial help from friends of the organization, they were able to purchase a total
of 890 acres for what became known as Heritage Farm, considered today to hold one of the most,
if not the most, diverse garden variety collections in the nation.
Seed Savers' formal mission statement is to save North America's diverse
but endangered garden heritage for future generations.
The organization has an international membership of about 13,000 members and has served
as a model for seed-saving networks that have sprung
up around [brief break in recording] the world.
Seed Savers backs up its collections at both the USDA Center for Genetic Resources Preservation
in Fort Collins and also in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
Some of you may have heard of the Seed Vault called the "Doomsday Vault."
It can probably be considered the ultimate insurance policy for the world's food supply.
It will secure for centuries millions
of seeds representing every important crop variety available in the world today.
[ Pause ]
Seed Savers doesn't just preserve plant germplasm, although it does that mostly
in the form of seeds, but also the human stories surrounding the origins and history
of an heirloom variety, like, for example, the Moon & Stars Watermelon,
once thought to be extinct, found to be growing just a hundred miles from the original location
of Seed Savers Exchange when it was located in Missouri, and it had been saved as an heirloom
by a man whose farm had always grown it, whose father had always grown it, in Tennessee.
Or there's also Lina Sisco's Bird Egg Beans, grown for years by the family of the Lina Sisco,
this woman who's pictured here,
and her grandmother had brought this variety to Missouri in the 1880s.
The photo on the other side is Kent Whealy,
if you didn't associate that with the other picture.
These intimate stories are about the efforts of individuals
to preserve agriculture biodiversity, the genetic spectrum so necessary
to safeguard our food supply from climate change, habitat loss, exploitation.
They, of course, weren't -- were just interested in the tradition
and the taste of what they were growing.
They were probably not aware of the loftier, the broader significance of what they were doing.
To a lesser degree, Seed Savers maintains rare breeds
of farm animals on Heritage Farm, as well.
Ancient White Park cattle, originally found in Great Britain, were all but extinct
until efforts to save the breed brought them back from the brink.
We can't know what genetic traits will be most needed in potential emergency situations,
so the whole objective is to preserve as many options as possible
in both plant and animal genetics.
It's all about maintaining genetic diversity.
Seed Savers has a staff of about 55 people, including some seasonal help with gardens
in the summer and then phone banks for catalog orders in the winter.
The staff are the primary users of the library here.
I frequently work with staff members in the departments
of publications, education, and preservation.
About 20,000 people visit Heritage Farm every year, many coming for special events,
such as the annual tomato tasting.
Each of the plates on that table -- those tables, by the way,
represent different varieties of tomatoes that are being sampled.
Every one of those is a different variety.
I might mention that since we save our garden seed here at Seed Savers,
one of the lovely staff perks we have here is free access to a lot of fruits and vegetables
that have been grown out in both preservation and commercial gardens to propagate seed.
And I mentioned the commercial gardens and should explain
that the organization also has a commercial branch doing catalog and seed rack sales
of open-pollinated varieties that helps fund everything else that happens at Seed Savers,
really, with nearly $5 million in seed and plant stock sales.
Seed Savers seed packs can now be found all over the United States,
and our seed catalog provides a resource for a customer base of about 50,000 gardeners.
With the boom in popularity of heirloom varieties over the past several years,
Seed Savers' commercial branch has really continued to expand substantially.
I live in this building, the main house that houses --
the [brief laughter] main office that houses administrative offices,
the collection department and labs, and the library.
And so we're at the library, once again.
Since I took -- as a classics major in college, I have to quote Cicero: "If you have a garden
and a library, you lack nothing."
"Si hortum in bibliotheca habes, deerit nihil."
That has been used all over libraries that are associated
with gardens, horticultural libraries.
Unfortunately, it's often mistranslated.
It's often translated -- translators cheat a little bit and translate it
"if you have a garden and a library," which really is not correct.
In Cicero's day, a garden was in an open-air atrium, and the library was tucked
around the roofed wall surrounding it.
But, really, what Cicero is suggesting is that libraries
and gardens provide all the food you need for both body and soul,
which I think is a great concept.
And so my library's in a garden, rather than the garden being in the library.
The Robert Becker Memorial Library occupies the top floor of an Amish-built,
timber-frame-construction building.
It is, frankly, a really beautiful space to work in.
I feel like I have the best office anywhere at Heritage Farm,
and a lot of visitors say that, too.
Located as it is in the loft of the building, though, I have to work hard
to maintain appropriate humidity and temperature levels.
These days in Iowa, when it's cold and crisp and dry,
I am running two humidifiers around the clock in the library.
And we do have plans for a new facility which will --
with appropriate HVAC system for the library in the long-range plan that we have.
The library at Seed Savers Exchange has grown organically, no pun intended,
over 36 years from the personal library of Diane Ott Whealy and Kent Whealy.
Volumes have been donated, review copies of books have been added,
technical and historical works have been acquired through time, as needed.
When I took over the library in 2010, I began examining what was already in the collection
and compared it to the mission of the organization.
And in 2011, I proposed a collection policy
that outlined specific areas I thought we should be collecting, which was approved by our board.
And so I've since been doing weeding and further collection development in the areas
that I've felt were appropriate for us.
I should mention [inaudible] the legacy of Robert Becker, after whom the library was named.
Becker lived in New York, was an extension agent
and an adjunct faculty member at Cornell University.
And he was also an avid gardener and a friend of Seed Savers.
He was an agricultural historian and had an admirable collection
of significant works in ag history.
So when Becker died in 1995, the Becker family donated his library to Seed Savers Exchange,
and that contribution helped propel the library into the research realm.
A half-time librarian was hired in the summer of 2009 to develop the library,
but left shortly thereafter for a full-time position in the local public school system.
So the administration was looking for -- the Seed Savers' administration was looking
for a replacement, and I came on board in January of 2010, still at half time
but moving later that year to full time.
And prior to hiring a librarian, the library had been locked and the books had been placed
on shelves in alphabetical order by author's name.
Not especially accessible.
So all that changed in a relatively short time.
About a quarter of the collection of 4500 titles is cataloged now, using LC classification,
and the general collection is circulated to staff, advisors,
and board members of Seed Savers Exchange only.
We don't have public access for -- we don't have public circulation.
There is public access, and people may visit the library and do research here
who are not a staff, advisor, or a board member of Seed Savers.
For those that can check out items, the circulation period is a month long.
The loan period is a month long.
Serials and periodicals have been collected and shelved in the library previously,
though they were rarely used, and I have made the subscription list more selective,
made sure our professional organizational colleagues are represented in the collection,
the publications from various organizations that are, really, our peers.
And also I allow patrons, those who I mentioned could have circulating privileges,
to check items out overnight.
The first librarian who was at Seed Savers for a brief time selected an inexpensive
and practical online integrated library system for Seed Savers called "Library World."
Maybe some of you are familiar with Library World.
It is customizable, and it's easy to use.
But it's not connected to OCLC.
So record downloads are limited to the Library of Congress and a select group of libraries
that have some agreement to share [inaudible] records with this company.
We call our online catalog "Roscoe" after a favorite dog
that lived on Heritage Farm for years.
Roscoe didn't like storms, but loved people.
And I had a photo of Roscoe on this slide to the right of the screen shot there,
but he was uncomfortable with the electronic nature of the presentation, so he disappeared.
Sorry. He was black and white.
In addition to the donation of the Robert Becker collection, we have added about 1500 rare
and special collection monographs on historical agriculture that we were able to purchase
from an East Coast collector with a gift from our board chair.
This has given the library a tremendous boost in terms
of historical agricultural research capacity, and it has also upped the ante
for the need for a new HVAC system.
With all of these rare books and special collection items in the library,
I'm very aware of the responsibility that I have as a preservation librarian.
Historic seed catalogs provide Seed Savers staff with important resources for identifying
and describing heirloom and open-pollinated varieties.
Our specific interest in seed catalogs dating pre-1940s has to do with the fact
that after World War II, the focus in agriculture shifted from open-pollinated
to hybrid varieties and industrial agriculture.
So we really do focus a lot on the older seed catalogs.
We recently received a gift of over 350 important historic catalogs from a donor
in Israel, a retired American expatriate seedsman named Dan Niedel [assumed spelling],
a gift for which we were very thankful.
Seed catalogs are -- provides our publications department with opportunities to draw upon some
of the beautiful illustrations in early catalogs that are out of copyright.
They are resources, then, for our own publications products.
These two lovely catalogs from local seed companies represent this --
a boon in color catalog covers used by seed companies in the early 20th century.
Nineteen twenty-two seems to have been a real big year for the coming
out of color catalog covers, for some reason.
Because they attracted customers, I guess.
This is an especially important seed catalog in our collection
because it's the first-known artifact in print that includes the word
"heirloom" to describe a plant type.
I mentioned contacting the Oxford English Dictionary editors about this earlier.
Billy Hepler started his own seed company at age 12, and he was the son of JR Hepler,
a botany professor at the University of New Hampshire.
And he heard his father describe a gift of bean seeds he received as "heirlooms."
Now, the issue I have of his catalog is the 1948 issue here because it has a picture of him.
He started in 1947, and it was on his first catalog that he included the term
"heirloom" beans, as you can see down below, his picture on the right.
The oldest item in our special collections in the rare monograph section is this work
by a physician and a printer named Charles Estienne entitled, in French --
and please pardon my French -- "L'agriculture, et maison rustique."
"Agriculture in the Rural Home."
Estienne includes a lot of illustrations of garden layouts for ornamental gardens
in this book, which make it really fun to look through.
He was essentially forced to leave medicine and take up printing, a family business,
and ended up authoring several books in Latin, as well as French.
An interesting [inaudible] history.
Here's another special item in the rare book collection.
It's a rebound edition of William Lawson's "A New Orchard and Garden,"
which was a very popular Renaissance work on gardening.
This copy had a lot of hand painting added to it at a later date, and the binding,
as well as a name painted on the title page, mistakenly ascribed this
to another well-known writer of the era, Gervase Markham, who was kind of a rowdy guy
who introduced the Arab horse to the British isles and died in a fight.
This Anglican priest -- Lawson was an Anglican priest, the opposite of this Markham,
and he also -- Lawson also authored "The Country Housewifes Garden" for herbs,
the first horticultural book ever written solely for women,
which I thought was an interesting piece.
This is a fun little book by a man named Leonard Meager, and in this book,
"The Mystery of Husbandry," Meager advised farmers and gardeners to taste the soil
to determine if it would be too salty, too acidic, or just sweet enough for growing.
Interestingly, that practice is still useful today,
as long as you're not eating too much dirt that has chemicals in it, nasty chemicals.
The name Jethro Tull is probably best known in my generation
as the moniker for a 1970s British rock band.
Maybe some of you out there remember Jethro Tull and the great flute player who was part
of that, and I can't remember his name.
Was the only Jethro Tull that I knew until I learned
about this important 18th century agriculturalist, inventor,
and writer who developed a horse-pulled seed drill that would plant in straight lines,
as opposed to the traditional scattering of seed used by farmers of the day.
This was part of the British agricultural revolution that spilled over into the colonies
and into the early history of the United States.
A lot of new techniques and new inventions were being created
at this time of Great Britain's history.
This book was widely published and republished, important work about the time, and still so.
And I should say that I wouldn't have known about the historical literature of this and some
of the other things that I've shown you here without the guidance of a man named Keith Crotz,
who is an antiquarian who specializes in agricultural history.
Keith was a friend of Robert Becker.
I don't have a picture of Keith to share with you here.
But Keith was a friend of Robert Becker and has been the primary advocate
on the Seed Savers board for the library and its research mission.
He brokered the library donation with the Becker family.
He's selected titles for acquisition for me, and he's guided me
to the literature on agricultural history.
And he is now chair of the board, I'm quite happy to say.
Lucky for me.
Among the historic collections we hold are some several monographs that actually represent some
of the amazing cover art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
With the East Coast collection, we acquired most of the major early periodical literature related
to American agriculture, and, thanks to a private donor,
we have an almost complete collection of organic gardening
and some other significant periodicals related
to the sustainable agricultural movement to which Seed Savers belongs.
And this extra little slide here is for those who might look at this later
and try to read what it says on the American Agriculturist there.
It won't be easy, but it might be fun to try.
We also have in our special collection some significant manuscripts,
like this note of thanks from Horace Greeley on New York Tribune stationary addressed
to a gentleman who had given him a box of peaches and pears that he'd neglected to eat --
that is, Greeley had neglected to eat before some of them spoiled.
We were surprised to find this.
Our director found it by accident as he was paging through the book,
and next to Abe Lincoln, Greeley was probably the most well-known figure in American social
and political history of the 19th century.
So we're pretty happy about having that.
[ Pause ]
We have another collection that is contained in 109 black binders sitting on the top shelf
of the length of the library, and these binders include documentation of thousands
of vegetable varieties that appeared in the seed trade over several decades.
And this labor of love was performed by David Thompson, the former CEO of a very large
and well-known seed company, Ferry-Morse Seed Company,
and he donated his work to Seed Savers Exchange.
One of the more popular collections we hold is that of oversize fruit and vegetable postcards.
The Wisconsin State Historical Society has a site for collection like this,
and they provide this explanation for the phenomenon, which always befuddled me.
I've seen this postcards many places but didn't know the story.
And the story is "Tall-Tale postcards emerged" --
I'm quoting from the Wisconsin State Historical Society --
"Tall-Tale postcards emerged around the turn of the 20th century when postcards came
to function as surrogates for travel.
Nowhere did these modified images become more prevalent than in rural communities that hoped
to forge an identity as places of agricultural abundance to encourage settlement and growth."
I've -- end of quote.
I've included more samples of these and other interesting special collections items
on the Becker Library at Seed Savers Exchange Facebook page.
Again, I encourage you to take a look at the Facebook page and maybe like it.
It's Becker, B-e-c-k-e-r, Becker Library at Seed Savers Exchange,
and I hope you will consider visiting the page and scrolling through the content.
There's some fun stuff there, I think.
The Robert Becker Memorial Library includes archival collections, as well,
in both digital and physical form.
We've had our complete collection of regular quarterly publications digitized,
starting with the mimeograph pages of our first so-called True Seed Exchange listings in 1976
and going all the way to the annual yearbook of 2011 that lists thousands of member offerings
of seeds for exchange in the network.
We're also trying to keep a collection of publicity
about seeds -- about Seed Savers Exchange.
This slide shows some of the earliest public exposure of Seed Savers Exchange
in Mother Earth News and organic gardening magazines.
And on the far left is Kent Whealy's initial invitation to seed-saving gardeners
to help him create the True Seed Exchange network that eventually became, simply,
Seed Savers Exchange way back in 1975, July 1975.
[ Pause ]
Every seed tells a story, and sometimes there are funny stories,
the stories of how the seeds came to us in packages that include --
that are so varied and that include such things as pantyhose.
Yes, indeed, we have gotten seeds in old pantyhose.
Every seed tells a story, as I said, and that's kind of the slogan for Seed Savers.
And we humans are hardwired to learn from stories.
That's why an important part of Seed Savers' mission is doing research,
gathering documentation, and collecting the back stories of the seed varieties in our collection.
We have begun a project we call "CORE," the Collection Origins Research Effort.
It involves going through the 26,000 records in our varietal database, scrubbing the data,
making corrections, reading the correspondence, and doing oral interviews with some
of the donors of our seed varieties.
We know this project will keep us all busy for several years to come.
We are, in essence, interpreting here at Seed Savers an amazing collection that relates
to our basic needs as humans -- our passion for food, sunlight, earth, water, community,
and saving the world one seed, one variety, one story at a time.
I really love what I do here, and I do what I love as a library professional in a small,
very special library and encourage you to follow or find your passion.
I know it's an old slogan, "bloom where you are planted," but you can find that to be true.
And I thank you.
May you love what you do and do what you love, as well, and maybe the best place
for you will be in a special library, as well.
Thank you, and please feel free to contact me with comments or questions.
My contact information is on this last slide here, as you can see
and now [simultaneous speakers] --
>> Michelle Holschuh Simmons: Thank you so much, Bill.
That was fabulous.
I know that people have lots of responses.
So first of all, let's give Bill a round of applause, a very quiet,
but enthusiastic round of applause.
And then I know that Marva asked a question earlier.
Marva, do you want to go ahead and take the mike,
or would you prefer that I just read your question?
What would you prefer?
[ Pause ]
Okay. She said for me to read it.
>> Bill Musser: Yeah, read [simultaneous speakers] --
>> Michelle Holschuh Simmons: She was asking about the collection, whether the materials are
in English or in German and other languages, as well.
>> Bill Musser: Most of the collection material we have is in English.
We have gotten seeds from other locations.
A lot of them are immigrant seeds, frankly.
And some -- a little bit of the documentation may be in other languages, but very little.
For a while, we were actually collecting from the former Soviet Republics at a time
when there was a fear that environmental degradation would destroy a lot of the varietal,
the varieties that existed of various plants and vegetables.
And so we had a big body of Russian stuff with Russian information that we have decided
to send back to the Soviet, well, the Soviet Union -- the former --
what was the former Soviet Union, the Russian Republics, to let the seed banks there,
who are already preserving most of those, anyway, take care of those.
We didn't feel that that was part of our collection, really, or our mission.
But in any case -- I'm sorry.
That's a long answer to a short question.
Some of our material is in other languages.
German is -- you know, it's relatively common.
Scandinavian and German languages are probably the most common, other than English.
>> Michelle Holschuh Simmons: Thank you, Bill.
I see that Brittany has a question.
Did you see?
It's in the chat window.
She said, "Who has borrowing privileges at the library?"
Could you respond to that one, as well?
>> Bill Musser: Yep, sure.
I can see that there, and yes, the ones
who have borrowing privileges are Seed Savers staff members.
It doesn't matter if they are temporary or permanent.
I don't discriminate in that regard.
So Seed Savers staff members, board members of Seed Savers Exchange.
And we also have a group of advisors to Seed Savers Exchange,
who are kind of technical advisors for our gardening here at Seed Savers.
They all get -- they all have borrowing privileges for a month.
>> Michelle Holschuh Simmons: All right.
It looks like we have quite a few questions being posted.
Bill, can you see the questions?
Marva posted one.
>> Bill Musser: Yes.
>> Michelle Holschuh Simmons: She said, "Has anyone researched the origin
of the seeds all the way back to their wild roots?
Were any actually hybrids naturally created by farmers in the old age?"
>> Bill Musser: Yes, to both of those questions.
There's a lot of interesting work that's been done, especially on the roots of --
the wild roots of corn, for example, and wheat and the grains.
There has been some good research work done.
And a Russian named Nikolai Vavilov, who is kind of considered the father
of genetic preservation, who died tragically,
was one of those who went and collected those wild roots.
So if you're interested in reading a really fascinating story, read, let's see,
Peter Pringle's biography of Nikolai Vavilov.
V-a-v-i-l-o-v, Nikolai.
But if you -- yeah, I can't think off the top of my head specific other books that are
about the wild roots, but certainly a lot of information is there.
Also, hybrids, yes, created by farmers in old age.
Hybrids can stabilize after a certain point, and that is how we get new varieties,
ultimately, when hybrids stabilize.
But, generally speaking, hybrids are unstable.
The kind of thing that we get nowadays is hybridized
and specifically meant for one year of planting.
And I see some other questions.
>> Michelle Holschuh Simmons: Yes.
April has a question.
How did Seed Savers Exchange library settle on LC?
Her organization is using some kind of modified Dewey.
>> Bill Musser: That's a very good question.
I pondered that myself when we were talking about the classification of the library.
We had a consultant come in from the Chicago Botanic Garden library,
and she recommended the Library of Congress classification.
Sometimes libraries have a more idiosyncratic way, especially small,
special libraries can do kind of an idiosyncratic way of classification.
But because I am the most familiar with LC classification, also,
and because the research community that I'm wanting to approach or the audience
that I'm trying to reach, this research community,
historical agriculture research community, would be used to using university libraries,
and university libraries generally use LC.
>> Michelle Holschuh Simmons: Thank you, Bill.
And Chanel [assumed spelling] asked, "Were you a gardener or did you have an interest
in gardening prior to your job with Seed Savers Exchange?"
>> Bill Musser: I was going to say something about that and then I thought oh,
I can do that in the question and answer.
So this is a great opportunity, thank you.
I grew up on a farm, and we gardened all the time when I was growing up.
And then when I went away to school and seemed to move a lot,
I didn't really have a place to garden.
I didn't own property.
And now we have a garden in our home.
We have property.
We own property, and so we are gardening now at our home.
And, I guess, my gardening interest has grown tremendously since I have started working
with Seed Savers because I'm not only getting the richness of the agricultural history
that I'm around and learning about, but also the knowledge gained of the variety,
the vast variety and beauty of all of the vegetable and fruit varieties
that are here at Seed Savers Exchange.
So that has just really piqued my interest more so.
And now that I have opportunities to garden, we are using Seed Savers seeds and saving seeds.
>> Michelle Holschuh Simmons: [brief laughter] That's fabulous.
Shiloh [assumed spelling] mentioned that she found an article from the National Geographic
that mentioned Seed Savers Exchange.
She has a link there for those of you who might want to click on that.
Lauren asked, "Has the organization also been pulled into policy work dealing
with agricultural diversity, and, if so, has this influenced your work?"
>> Bill Musser: Seed Savers has tried to, well,
Seed Savers has certainly spoken out about diversity.
But we, as a nonprofit, have to be careful about becoming too political.
And yet I think our influence, if we have -- we have something called the Safe Seed Pledge
that we use organic and non-GMO seed and produce, you know, produce it that way.
And I think that our statements are through what we do.
What we believe in is conveyed through our catalogs and through just our mission here,
and a lot of people have taken notice of that mission,
and I think that mission speaks volumes, frankly, to policymakers.
But individuals on the board have been very active.
But Seed Savers as an organization hasn't done any specific work
as an organization that way with policy.
>> Michelle Holschuh Simmons: Thank you.
Jennifer is actually joining us from [brief break in recording] Shanghai, and she is asking,
"Is there a program for acquiring the genetic sequence of the seeds at Seed Savers?"
>> Bill Musser: No.
We don't have the technology for that.
The -- you know, the USDA laboratories would have that, but we don't.
Our laboratory is relatively small.
>> Michelle Holschuh Simmons: Okay [simultaneous speakers].
>> Bill Musser: So I guess the answer is no.
>> Michelle Holschuh Simmons: [brief laughter] And Marva asked,
"Is there a European organization that does the same work?
If so, is there cross-continent collaboration?"
>> Bill Musser: Yes.
In fact, there's an Irish Seed Savers.
There is a Swiss -- no, an Austrian Seed Savers.
There's a Danish Seed Savers organization.
There are Seed Savers organizations, small and large, in all sorts of countries in Europe.
We collaborate with -- in fact, we just had the President
of the Danish Seed Savers come to Decorah for a visit.
I guess it's sort of like coming to Mecca for a lot of the people who are involved
in seed-saving work because Seed Savers really was the first organization
to do this kind of thing.
But yes, we collaborate with them.
We're helping the Danish Seed Savers try to find seeds that came with immigrants from Denmark
and to repatriate them in Denmark.
>> Michelle Holschuh Simmons: Okay.
That's great.
And then I believe that's Randy, who is signed in as "IT," asked, "What are the differences
between hybrid seeds and GMO seeds?"
Can you tackle that one?
>> Bill Musser: Hybrid seeds generally are made from a natural cross between, you know,
a natural cross-pollination between different varieties of the same basic plant.
GMO seeds usually incorporate a genetic element that is from something not necessarily
of that same plant or it could be from something entirely different.
Its genetic piece that goes into GMO seeds is not naturally part of that variety
or that, even that species, sometimes.
Things are pulled from all sorts of places.
Genetic material is pulled from all sorts of places to incorporate into GMO seeds.
That's my understanding.
I hope that answers the question.
>> Michelle Holschuh Simmons: Please, let's give Bill another round of applause.
And thank you so much, Bill, for sharing all of this information.
I feel totally privileged to have learned all of this from you.
I am delighted to have a little view of your world
in your current library, and so thank you so much.
And please like his library page on Facebook.
And if you have other questions, Bill posted his e-mail address earlier,
and I'm sure he would be happy to respond to a question by e-mail if you need to e-mail him.
Thank you so much.
And -- oh, he has it up the screen, so note it there at the bottom.
>> Bill Musser: There you go.
[ Silence ]