feb08b2.indd


Ann Wheeler 

Teaching old dirt new tricks 

Marianne Stowell Bracke is the agricultural sciences information specialist at Purdue 
University. She recently shared with me why 
she loves her job. After our chat, I have a deep­
ened appreciation for agricultural sciences 
and a better understanding of one librarian’s 
important role in supporting this fi eld. 

What is Agricultural Science? 
At Purdue, agricultural sciences includes the 
departments of agronomy, 
animal sciences, botany and 
plant pathology, entomology, 
food science, forestry and 
natural resources, agricultural 
education, and horticulture 
and landscape architecture. 

The range of subjects suits 
Bracke. “I like the variety. 
Each department is a little bit 
different in how they work 
with the library. I work with 
undergrads, grads, research­
ers, and the Agricultural 
Extension. I provide refer­
ence, instruction, collection 
development; I do a little bit of everything 
in that regard.” 

Bracke raves about the faculty she works 
with. “I really love the people that are drawn 
to the field of agriculture. The scientists and 
professors I work with are very down­to­earth 
people. They’re often very creative, very 
inventive, but also very practical. It’s easy to 
build working relationships with them.” 

Digitizing dirt 
Bracke is a tenure­track faculty member, so 
research and publishing are a required part of 

Marianne Stowell Bracke 

her job. She enjoys this aspect of her work and 
values the opportunity to collaborate with her 
peers. “I really like the project part of my job. 
It brings so much of it together. I get to work 
with faculty, I get to work with my colleagues, 
we get to create something new.” 

In one such collaboration, Bracke and 
Purdue’s GIS librarian are working with the 
agronomy department to digitize soil sur­
veys of the local county. “Soil surveys have 

always been of interest to 
me. The older soil surveys 
aren’t being digitized in any 
systematic way, although the 
information is still valuable. 
It can show how the soil 
and land use have changed 
over the last hundred years, 
how society has moved from 
small farms to agrobusiness 
and more land development, 
greater population, that sort 
of thing.” 

“Our agronomy depart­
ment is celebrating its cen­
tennial, and we wanted to do 

something to help mark that. We didn’t want 
to just do a straight digitization project, so in 
addition to digitizing the soil survey text and 
capturing the map as a PDF, we turned the 
map into a GIS layer that is compatible with 
GIS files of the same area today. It makes the 
map more of a living document rather than 
simply a recreation of a picture.” 

The response from faculty has been ex­
citing. “People had no idea that the library 

Ann Wheeler is the librarian at the Maryland Department 
of Natural Resources. Have a story idea for Job of a 
Lifetime? E-mail Ann at awheeler@dnr.state.md.us 

C&RL News February 2008  80 

mailto:awheeler@dnr.state.md.us


could do a project like that. It reminds them 
that there’s probably data between different 
departments that people might like to share, 
but because they’re in different departments, 
they don’t necessarily talk to each other. As 
librarians, we have different boundaries and 
can talk between departments. It’s been a 
great promotional tool for the library, and 
already it’s generated some other project 
ideas.” 

Bracke sees this project growing and de­
veloping in the future. “Ultimately what we’re 
doing is creating a framework with the GIS 
layer. We can hang any kind of information 
off that framework. There’s no reason we’d 
have to limit ourselves to agromony data.” 

Embedded librarianship 
In another collaboration, Bracke is working 
with Purdue’s business librarians to provide 
embedded librarian 
services to an agricul­
tural marketing class, 
where students are cre­
ating and implement­
ing marketing plans for 
various pork products 
sold at Purdue’s cam­
pus meat shop. Bracke 
and the business librarians attend group 
meetings and will be present for the fi nal 
presentations. 

“We’re actually attaching ourselves to 
the group. We’re taking more of an infor­
mation consultant role, rather than doing 
a one­shot teaching session and saying, if 
you need us, here’s where you can fi nd us. 
At the same time, we’re not giving them the 
answers. We still want to make it a teaching 
experience.” 

This is a new instructional approach for 
Bracke. “The head of our business library 
came to us from the University of Michigan 
business school, where they have a well­
developed embedded librarian approach 
throughout the curriculum. She wanted to 
bring this to Purdue, and I thought this would 
be a great class to try this out. I took the 
idea to the business librarians and asked if 

Agricultural Sciences Information 
Specialist 

What: Agricultural Sciences 

Where: Purdue University 

For more information, visit: 
www.lib.purdue.edu 

they had the staffing and time to support it, 
and they did. It was really satisfying because 
the two faculty members teaching the class 
immediately saw the benefit of it. We didn’t 
have to sell them on it.” 

It’s been an enriching experience for 
both Bracke and the students. “This is a 
challenging class. It’s only the second week 
of classes, and the students are still getting 
their head around what questions to ask. It’s 
really rewarding to be in on learning at that 
level. It helps me understanding how stu­
dents think, for example, why do they think 
Google has everything? Or why do they get 
attached to one library database and use it 
for everything?” 

She’s also learned a lot about pork prod­
ucts over the course of the class. “Did you 
know there’s actually 15 grades of bacon? 
There’s the kind that shrivel up and get re­

ally curly, and the kind 
that stays really really 
flat, and the kind that 
just gets wrinkly on 
the edges. And each of 
those has fi ve different 
classes underneath it.” 
The next time you get 
a pork­related refer­

ence question stumper, you’ll know who 
to call! 

Agriculture is everything 
At the end of the day, it’s the broader im­
plications that keep Bracke interested in 
agricultural sciences. “Agriculture effects the 
most basic parts of our lives. We need safe 
food, we need clean water, we need clothes. 
I think the global implications are really excit­
ing. War­torn nations don’t have things like 
clean water, or enough food, or safe food. 
These are all things that if we didn’t have, 
our society would break down. Agriculture 
touches on everything.” 

If you enjoy working with down­to­earth 
people, looking for practical solutions to 
global problems, agricultural sciences li­
brarianship may be the right field for you, 
too. 

February 2008  81 C&RL News