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Tag Archives: Nebraska Publications Clearinghouse
Discovering State Docs: “There Once Was a Man from Nebraska…”
Happy National Poetry Month! When you hear “state government documents” do you immediately think of poetry? Me neither! The Nebraska Publications Clearinghouse receives documents every month from all Nebraska state agencies, including the University of Nebraska Press, which recently sent us Ted Kooser’s “The Windflower Home Almanac of Poetry.” It is a reprint of his original 1980 book, and one of many of his titles we have in this collection.
“The Windflower Home Almanac of Poetry is an anthology of poems originally selected by Ted Kooser in 1980 and published by his Windflower Press, a small, independent publisher that specialized in poetry from the Great Plains. The collection contains almost two hundred poems from dozens of poets and was designed to resemble a commonplace farmer’s almanac.
The Windflower Press was the sole operation of Kooser, who was later named the first U.S. poet laureate from the Great Plains. His press gained national recognition for highlighting the work of the region’s young poets, and its Windflower Home Almanac of Poetry earned notice from the Library Journal as one of its era’s best small press books.”
In the Editor’s Note, Kooser talks about the process of typesetting and pasting the poems together with illustrations he’d collected from old almanacs, long before the advent of software to ease these tasks.
One of the most prestigious academic presses in the country, the University of Nebraska Press sends us around 75 select titles per year, which are added to the Nebraska Publications Clearinghouse, also known as the Nebraska State Documents Collection. This collection is comprised of publications issued by Nebraska state agencies, ensuring that state government information is available to a wide audience and that those valuable publications are preserved for future generations. University of Nebraska Press books, as well as all state documents, are available for checkout by libraries and librarians for their patrons.
Kooser, Ted (Ed.). The Windflower Home Almanac of Poetry. University of Nebraska Press, 2024.
Discovering State Docs: “Take Up the Apple”
“At the annual meeting of the Society, held in January, 1893, the Secretary recommended that the plan of issuing the reports of the Society as monographs be adopted. This contemplated issuing a series of four or five volumes, each of which should be devoted, largely, to one topic. The Society accepted the suggestion, and instructed the officers to prepare a program for the next annual meeting which should take up the apple and treat it as fully as available material would allow. This volume is the result.
At the meeting of which this is a record a resolution was adopted taking the grape, and such other of the small fruits as can be treated
in the same volume, as the topic for the next winter’s meeting.
With no precedent for guidance it was no easy matter to get together just what would make the best sort of a report on a single fruit, and the result is by no means perfect. No one realizes this more than those who have had the work in hand.” (Excerpt from the preface of the Annual Report of the Nebraska State Horticultural Society for the year 1894.)
This document is just one of the thousands of historical annual reports (1870s through 1956) from Nebraska state government agencies that are available in the Nebraska Public Documents database. This free and publicly-accessible collection is result of a collaborative digitization effort between the Nebraska Library Commission, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the University of Nebraska-Omaha, and the Nebraska State Historical Society. (Read more about the project here!)
Historical government documents provide a glimpse into how our Nebraska forebears lived, worked, and governed. Primary sources such as the ones found in the Nebraska Public Documents database help researchers, students, and the general public understand the important issues and events of the day, and what motivated our elected officials to make decisions and the impacts those choices made. Take a look – what will you discover?
Posted in General, Information Resources, Preservation, What's Up Doc / Govdocs
Tagged annual reports, apples, digitization, Government documents, historical documents, Horticultural Society, Nebraska Public Documents, Nebraska Publications Clearinghouse, primary sources, state documents
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