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Future
Projects
Although
there are other seed preservation organizations and companies that market
open-pollinated seeds, very little effort is made at actually providing
a historical information. We believe that communication and
community are as important to seed preservation as the physical work of
growing and banking seeds.
The following
are "wish list" projects that your support will make possible:
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Library
- (Please also refer to "Catalog
Scans" and "Library
Donations") The "Library" is intended to be a physical
space to house the collections of books, journals, company records and
seed catalogs, as well as a virtual web space where the electronic
forms of these materials can be accessed and referenced. This is to be the core function of this research Web site. Financial support would help to
build the library facility and to procure and scan
historically important horticultural documents. These document
scans would then be made available.
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[UPDATE
6/27/04] - The Futterman Collection - A *HUGE* donation of 31
boxes of books was made to the horticultural
library by a lifelong collector and preservationist. Read more about it and learn how you can help get the
information available for use by
clicking here.
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[UPDATE
03/18/08] - Although the library continues to grow, very little support outside of that from the Victory Seed Company has ever been realized. Progress is slow but continuing as resources are available.
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[UPDATE
10/18/14] - The Rezelman
Collection - We are honored to help the family preserve his
agricultural library as well as his memory.
Click here for a list
of titles donated.
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[UPDATE
6/28/17] - Very little progress has been accomplished. Donations
of reference materials has all but stopped. With a decline in sales,
the Victory Seed Company has not been able to subsidize any work
beyond the scope of their core preservation mission. Roughly $60,000
is required to construct and furnish the library facility. Another
$40,000 would be required to hire a temporary, part-time librarian to
organize and catalog the collection and possibly begin coordinating
the digitization effort.
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[UPDATE 2/10/07] - This work, although a background task, has begun. Several old companies have been researched.
Instead of waiting until complete and thorough histories and timelines
are written, we have decided to post them as "works in progress" and
update as information is made available.
Click here for more information.
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Seed
Bank of Genetic Material - The Victory Horticultural Group, LLC has initiated
this project and is actively working at collecting, documenting, and
preserving seeds of edible plant varieties. It is hoped
that this can eventually be maintained under this organization.
Timing will be determined by the "Legal" project below.
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Legal
- If you are a lawyer or accounting professional and would like to
donate your time to help us through the process of becoming a
non-profit, tax exempt organization, please contact
us. This would allow up to apply for grants and be more
appealing to donors. In this way, we believe that we could become
a structured research organization with the ability to build a physical
research library, seed bank, and compensating the necessary staff.
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Private
Web
Server - This would allow us better control to customize
needs and in the long run, be less expensive than a hosted web
service. An internal Web server would allow us to serve up
images (without incurring bandwidth overuse fees), databases, creating
user forums, etc. It would also allow us the ability to add
storage space and other system improvements as necessary.
To make this
project more reliable and perhaps more efficient, it will require computer hardware
such as a low-end pc with large
capacity hard drives, tape drive, media, and backup software. If
we all wanted this to be extremely reliable, a mirrored server and large
uninterruptible power supplies with generator backup would be necessary.
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[UPDATE 10/14/03] - Finally, after over a year of starts and
stops, a server is online. It is tiny, dated, slow and somewhat
limited, it is never the less, running!
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[UPDATE 10/25/04] - As a result of a recent computer system
upgrade / shuffle at the Victory Horticultural Group, a new (old) computer was donated to become the web server replacing
the very old and dated server that we brought online last fall. It
is not yet implemented as time has not been available.
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[UPDATE 2/10/07] - The "new" server is now showing signs of age. It has been continuously powered up and operating for over five years. It sometimes "forgets" what it is doing and needs kick-started. Additionally, its hard drive storage capacity has been reached. New equipment will be acquired and installed as soon as resources
(financial and human) are available.
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[UPDATE 3/05/08] - The old server continued to limp along and was finally replaced with a server that has greater disk capacity, speed and memory. Additionally, operating system and other software upgrades were made.
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[UPDATE
10/18/14] - The above is very out of date. The "new" server
from 2008 died. Over the years, we did repair the old server,
added a second DSL, and split the load between two servers. With
the demise of the server and the cost to operate two high speed fiber
internet connections, we decided to consolidate back onto one server,
offloading some of the server traffic (mainly catalog file storage) to a
hosted account off of the farm.
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In about 2001, our local telephone
service started offering a 6MB/384 kBps ADSL connection. We were one
of the first customers to sign up and a beta tester for the service. To meet the demands placed upon the library's web server, we added a
second DSL line of service in the mid-2000s, dedicated to the library. This was upgraded to a fiber optic high speed internet service in late
2012.
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[UPDATE
10/18/14] - A dedicated
server and internet connection is a costly configuration in both
monthly expense plus management and hardware costs. Before all
else, we have to be good stewards of our resources so that we can
continue to perform our
primary mission of seed variety preservation. Considering that we
have been receiving little or no outside monetary backing for this
project (please
consider donating here) and that the economic times are
greatly affecting cash flow, when the second server died this week, we
had to make a difficult, but not very hard, decision to drop the
dedicated line to the library's server.
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Community
Space
- Along with providing a world-class information resource, we wish to
create a means for connecting gardeners, researchers, organizations
and others interested in the subject material. This can be
accomplished through yet to be determined forum software.
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[UPDATE 10/14/03] - One of the benefits of working in the Linux
world is the environment of open license software. We were able
to obtain and install (and learn) phpBB2. This is a forum
software application that is full-featured and should serve the
community well.
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[UPDATE 9/1/06] - Due to a continual attack from spammers and a
lack of human resources, we just could not keep up with the attention
that the board required. It was turned off until we can upgrade
our server and secondly research and implement a more secure and
easier to manage board system.
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