News Release Distributed 03/26/14

BATON ROUGE, La. – The LSU AgCenter and the Louisiana State University Library recently completed digitizing approximately 20,000 pages of the Sugar Bulletin, the monthly publication of the American Sugar Cane League.

The ability to electronically search all issues of the Sugar Bulletin will be an invaluable tool for researchers, industry personnel and other interested parties, said LSU AgCenter sugarcane specialist Kenneth Gravois.

Gravois worked with Gina Costello, special collections digital services librarian, and Cristina Caminita, agriculture and instruction librarian, with the LSU Libraries.

The project was funded by a grant from the American Sugar Cane League, a nonprofit organization of Louisiana sugarcane growers and processors.

The Sugar Bulletin reports current research, farming and factory practices, and legislative news from Washington and Baton Rouge, Gravois said. It began publication in 1922 as a semi-monthly newsletter, and 24 issues were published each year until March 1989, when the bulletin switched to a monthly format.

“The Sugar Bulletin has cataloged much research information and important industry issues over the years,” Gravois said. “And the scarcity of complete sets and the age of this publication make information searches difficult.”

Over the years, the American Sugar Cane League, the LSU AgCenter and the U.S Department of Agriculture Sugarcane Research Unit at Houma have researched a variety of topics pertinent to the sugar industry, said Jim Simon, general manager of the league.

“To have all this historical research available can certainly pay a benefit to our industry,” Simon said. “We’re very pleased we were able to get the bulletin into digital electronic format so the information also is available to the public.”

The digitized material is available online at http://cdm16313.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/search/collection/p16313coll31.