Extend the life of your bouquet!

Kumar, Srivastava and Dixit report in the Journal of Horticultural Science & Biotechnology (2008, p.749-54) that a sugar/alcohol solution successfully extended the vase-life of cut roses.

Adding a 3% sucrose + 3% ethanol solution to vase water increased water uptake and delayed senescence in several varieties of roses.

This is a simple alternative to treatments such as aminoethoxyvinylglycine, aminooxyacetic acid, or silver thiosulphate, commonly used in the commercial flower market.

[image = Flickr, Creative Commons]

Student bus pass pickup at Steenbock

Student Bus Pass

Steenbock Library will become a new pick-up location for Spring/Summer 09 student bus passes, since Union South is closing. Students can also still pick them up at Memorial Union.

Free bus passes will be available in these two locations Monday-Friday January 12-16 from 10am - 5pm, and Monday-Friday January 20-30 from 10am - 6pm.

Starting Monday, February 4, both new and replacement passes will be available only at the new StudentPrint location, Monday-Friday from 10am - 6:30pm.

Faculty/Staff Bus Pass

Free bus passes for UW-Madison faculty, academic staff, classified staff, post docs, LTEs and emeriti can be picked up at one of the UW Transportation Services Offices. These passes are good from September 1 - August 31 each year.

Additionally, employees of UW Hospital, WI Alumni Association, UW Foundation, WI Historical Society and WARF are eligible for these passes.

Graduate and undergraduate student employees should instead pick up the free student bus pass (see above).

Library hours & bus schedule

Steenbock Library Hours

• 12/12: 8:00 am - 1:00 am
• 12/13-14: 10:00 am - 1:00 am
• 12/15-18: 8:00 am - 1:00 am
• 12/19: 8:00 am - 7:00 pm
• 12/20-21: CLOSED
• 12/22-23: 8:00 am - 5:00 pm
• 12/24-28: CLOSED
  
• 12/29-30: 8:00 am - 5:00 pm
• 12/31: CLOSED
• 1/1: CLOSED
  
• 1/2: 8:00 am - 5:00 pm
• 1/3-4: CLOSED
• 1/5-9: 8:00 am - 5:00 pm
• 1/10-11: CLOSED
• 1/12-16: 8:00 am - 5:00 pm
• 1/17-19: CLOSED
  
• 1/20-31: 8:00 am - 1:00 am (standard schedule)
  

Bus Route 80

• 12/12-20: Standard schedule
• 12/21-23: Recess schedule
• 12/24-25: No service12/26-31: Recess schedule
• 1/1: No service
• 1/2-19: Recess schedule
• 1/20-31: Standard schedule
  

Bus Routes 11, 28, 38, 44

• 12/12-31: Standard schedule
• 1/1-31: Standard schedule
  

Wiscard photo ID cards + Library cards

Photo ID cards
Beginning January 5th, students, staff and faculty will visit the Wiscard office’s new location in Rm.4316 Memorial Union for UW-Madison photo ID cards, passport photos and other services. The old Union South office's last open day is December 22nd. Upon completion in summer 2011, the Wiscard office will return to the new Union South.

Library cards
UW-Madison students, staff & faculty use Wiscard as a library card. For MadCat, WorldCat or Library Express book & article delivery requests, use your Wiscard ID number (the 10 digits under your name plus the 11th "issue code" digit. Use your NetID instead for off-campus access to e-books & online journal subscriptions.

Wisconsin residents can get a FREE borrowing card to check out materials at Steenbock Library (agricultural & life sciences) and Ebling Library (health sciences), or Wisconsin's Water Library.

The following are additionally eligible for a FREE courtesy card to borrow materials from ANY UW-Madison library:

• Spouses, domestic partners, & children of UW-Madison faculty, staff & students
• Employees of the Wisconsin Historical Society, UW Credit Union, Wisconsin Union, State of Wisconsin, Dane County, & City of Madison
• Wisconsin social work coordinators and public PK-12 educators
• Faculty of Wisconsin private colleges, MATC, Edgewood College, Beloit College, CIC & OCLC institutions
• Students & staff of MATC, Edgewood College, and Beloit College
• Donors (Friends of the Libraries)

For $30 per year, the following are eligible for an annual fee card to borrow materials from ANY UW-Madison library:

• Wisconsin residents
• Corporations registered with the Wisconsin Dept. of Financial Institutions

All other individuals and businesses may use their public library's interlibrary loan services, or one of our fee-based information services on campus.

Anyone can use UW-Madison library resources on site for FREE.

Proquest down 12/13-14

Proquest database maintenance

• Saturday, Dec. 13 at ~9:00 p.m. to Sunday, Dec.14 at ~9:00 a.m.

Unavailable during this window:

• ABI/Inform - business
• Alt-Press Watch
• American Periodicals Series
• Dissertations & Theses (ProQuest Digital Dissertations)
• Ethnic NewsWatch
• GenderWatch
• Hoover's Company Records
• National Newspaper Abstracts
• ProQuest Historical Newspapers - NYT, etc.
• ProQuest Newspapers
• ProQuest Research Library - multidisciplinary

Links to Google Books added to MadCat library catalog

UW-Madison libraries have added 1000's of links from the MadCat library catalog to online versions in Google Books and the Big 10's shared digital repository, HathiTrust.

If an item we have in MadCat has been digitized by Google, the MadCat record will include the link: View available text online.

If a cover image is available, it will be shown in the MadCat record with the link: More Information At Google Books - whether or not the text is searchable or can be read online.

More E-books!

The libraries buy 1000's more online e-books, and provide access to many free e-books. Most of these are available through MadCat, and/or the following:

• American Memory - Library of Congress
• ASABE Technical Library - Am Soc of Ag & Bio Engineers
• Digital National Security Archive
• EngNetBase - technical handbooks & textbooks
• FAO Corporate Document Repository
• Kirk-Othmer - encyclopedia of chemical technology
• Knovel - technical handbooks & textbooks
• Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• National Academy Press - many subjects
• NCBI Bookshelf - health sciences
• NetLibrary - many subjects
• Safari Techbooks - programming
• Stat!Ref - health sciences
• StatsRefBase - statistics handbooks & textbooks
• Synthesis Digital Library - engineering, computer science
• UW Digital Collections - historical, local

Top Wisconsin vegetable growers

Top Wisconsin vegetable growers
21st Annual American Vegetable Grower Top 100
October 2008

Rank among Northern growers (acreage):

#2 Hartung Brothers - snap beans, sweet corn, cucumbers, beets, carrots, peas, lima beans
#3 Paramount Farms - potatoes, sweet corn, beans, peas
#5 Heartland Farms - potatoes, sweet corn, beans, peas
#12 Borzynski Farms - cabbage, sweet corn, peas, peppers
#14 Wysocki Produce Farm - potatoes, beans, peas, sweet corn, pickles
#15 Bula Gieringer Farms - potatoes, sweet corn, peas, beans
#18 Weekly Farms - potatoes, beans, sweet corn, peas
#19 Gary Bula Farms - potatoes, snap beans, peas, sweet corn
#21 Sowinski Farms - potatoes, beans, peas
#23 Worzella & Sons - potatoes, sweet corn, beans

FREE! Bio/chem software

Did you know?
UW faculty, staff & students can download these chemical software tools for free!

ChemBioOffice 2008

• Includes ChemDraw Std 11.0, ChemDraw ActiveX, and Chem3D ActiveX
  
• Draw chemical reactions and structures - MS Office integration, customizable arrow tools, color faded shapes, and terminal carbon labeling
• Query online databases and view & publish online structures

SciFinder Scholar

• World's largest collection of organic & inorganic substance information
• 16 million+ chemical reactions
• 1 billion+ predicted & experimental properties
• CAS Registry number database
• Patent records within 2 days of issue
• Sequences from CAS and GenBank, linked to the literature
• Article abstracts from 10,000+ currently published journals
• Regulatory and supplier information
  

Beilstein / Gmelin MDL Crossfire Commander

• Beilstein (organic) & Gmelin (inorganic/organometallic) databases provide preparations, reactions and properties of chemical substances
  
• Searchable by chemical structure, formula, physical property parameters, chemical reaction, and literature citation
• Beilstein also includes pharmacological, ecotoxicological and bioactivity data

More tools

• Chemistry Computing Center software
• Condor - distributed, high-throughput computing
• Game of Life
• Mauve - genome evolution
• OME at LOCI - microscopy visualization
• Steenbock Library Infolab - Amino Acids, Stryer's Biochemistry, etc.
• WinPLT - chemical structures
  

Agriculture + state laws

Hein Online - Subject Compilations of State Laws
A directory of 18,000+ articles, books, government documents, court opinions & websites that compare state laws on hundreds of subjects.

Subjects include:

• Agricultural Cooperatives
• Agricultural Districts
• Agriculture
• Biotechnology
• Corporate Farming
• Environmental Protection
• Farm Machinery
• Farm Products
• Farmland
• Farms and Farming
• Flowers
• Food
• Grain Dealers
• Insects
• Land Use
• Organic Farming and Food
  
• Pesticides
• Plants
• Right to Farm
• Scientific Research
• Viruses
• Wetlands
• Wildlife

Wisconsin State Statutes
There's also a Subject Matter Index for the Wisconsin Statutes. Topics of interest include:

• Agricultural societies
• Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection Dept.
• Agriculture and farming
• Animals
  
• Cranberries
• Endangered species
  
• Fertilizer
• Fish and game
  
• Food regulation
  
• Forest croplands
  
• Forests, logging and trees
  
• Groundwater protection
• Insect pests
• Irrigation
• Lyme disease
• Managed forest lands
• National Forests
• National Parkways
• Natural Resources Department
• Nurseries
• Pesticides
• Plants and plant industry
• Pollution
• Rural planning
• Soil
• Soil and water conservation
• State Geologist
  
• Statistics
  
• Weeds
  

Changes to SciFinder Scholar off-campus use

To set up WiscVPN for Scifinder Scholar access from off-campus:

1. Reserve a WiscVPN static IP address.
2. Download and install the current WiscVPN client
3. Verify that you can connect using the dynamic profile.
4. Locate the on-campus static profile.
5. SAVE in the profiles directory of the VPN client - C:\ProgramFiles\Cisco Systems\VPN Client\profiles
6. Launch WiscVPN.
7. Click WiscVPN-OnCampusStatic.
8. Click CONNECT.
9. Enter your STATIC VPN LOGIN and your NetID PASSWORD.

To access SciFinder Scholar from off-campus:

1. Launch WiscVPN.
2. Click WiscVPN-OnCampusStatic.
3. Click CONNECT.
4. Launch SciFinder Scholar.

What is the SciFinder Scholar database?

• Article abstracts from 10,000+ scientific journals
• Cover-to-cover coverage for more than 1,500 key chemical journals (1994+)
• Patent references from 57 authorities around the world
• Abstracts for conference proceedings, technical reports, books, dissertations
• 39 million+ organic and inorganic chemical substances - synonyms, molecular formulas, structure diagrams, properties
• 16 million+ single- and multi-step chemical reactions
• 60 million+ sequences from CAS and GenBank, linked to journal and patent literature
• Chemical supplier and regulatory information

Subject areas:

• Biochemistry - agrochemical regulators, biochemical genetics, fermentation, immunochemistry, pharmacology
• Organic chemistry - amino acids, biomolecules, carbohydrates, organometallic compounds, steroids
• Macromolecular chemistry - cellulose, lignin, paper, coatings, inks, dyes, organic pigments, synthetic elastomers, textiles, fibers
• Applied chemistry - air pollution, ceramics, essential oils, cosmetics, fossil fuels, ferrous metals, alloys
• Physical, inorganic, analytical chemistry - surface chemistry, catalysts, phase equilibrium, nuclear phenomena, electrochemistry

See also: our SciFinder Scholar library guide.

UW Digital Collections

The UW Digital Collections Center has digitized images and texts across many subject areas.

Here are those most relevant to plant & insect sciences:

Aldo Leopold Archives

• Main site
  

Digital Library for the Decorative Arts & Material Culture

• Main site
  
• Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening

Ecology and Natural Resources Collection

• Main site
  
• Arboretum Unpublished Research Works
• Minerals Yearbook
• Our first 50 years: the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum 1934-1984
• Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Wetlands Restoration and Creation
• Proceedings of the North American Prairie Conference
• Research Report (Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources)
• Soils of Wisconsin
• Technical Bulletin (Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources)
• Transport, Fate and Effects of Silver in the Environment
• Virginia M. Kline Collection: Ecological Communities of Wisconsin
• Wisconsin Groundwater Research and Monitoring Program Reports
• Wisconsin Land Economic Inventory Maps (Bordner Survey)

History of Science and Technology

• Main site
  
• Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and their Practical Application
• Pioneer Microbiologists of America
• Root Nodule Bacteria and Leguminous Plants
• Smithsonian Science Series

Science Collection

• Main site
  
• University of Wisconsin - Madison Botany Department Teaching Collection

State of Wisconsin Collection

• Main site
  
• A History of Agriculture in Wisconsin
• History of Wisconsin Agriculture and Rural Life
• Wisconsin Horticulturist: issued monthly by the WI State Horticultural Society

Wisconsin Cranberry School Proceedings

• Main site
  

Wisconsin Public Land Survey Records

• Main site
  

History of UW Horticulture

A Century of Horticulture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: 1889-1989
By Malcolm N. Dana
Steenbock Library, RBW7 AC 11.5 Ce 333 (4th floor)

• 1849 -- UW-Madison founded
• 1883-1885 -- Prof. William Trelease taught horticulture and botany
• 1885 -- Farm Short Course began; Horticulture participated from beginning
• 1889 -- Department of Horticulture founded, Prof. Emmett S. Goff hired
• 1889-1911 -- Located in King Hall; then moved to Horticulture Building
• 1889-1989 -- 90 faculty over the first century
• 1903-1917 -- Cranberry Experiment Station, 5 miles west of Port Edwards on Hwy 54
• 1904 -- Extension education as an assigned responsibility started with appt. of Walter S. Brown
• 1909 -- Cooperative Extension Service founded; preceded by less formal cooperation and education (ex: with WI Horticultural Society and WI State Cranberry Growers Assn.)
• 1915 -- Landscape architecture faculty "group" got underway
• 1916 -- Hancock Ag Research Station, Waushara County - marginally productive "Golden Sands" area with low water-holding capacity, subject to wind erosion and drought; early 1950s started irrigation from subsurface with aluminum pipe
• 1922 -- Peninsular Agricultural Research Station near Sturgeon Bay - apples, sour cherries, etc.
• 1934 -- Arboretum dedicated; Prof. Longenecker was its 1st director
• 1960 -- Acquired 160-acre farm, now connected to Arlington Ag Research Station; previous plots had been on site of Russell Labs, Babcock Hall, Nielsen Stadium, WARF building, and Parking lot 60
• 1960-1980 -- Built 10 greenhouses on Walnut St., and 9 at Arlington
• 1963 -- Plant Pathology moved to Russell Labs
• 1963-1967 -- UW CALS had contract with USAID for on-site faculty assistance at selected institutions outside U.S. - Horticulture faculty worked in Nigeria and Brazil
• 1964 -- Landscape Architecture founded as separate department, under Prof. Longenecker
• 1970s -- Added Horticulture Annex at 2105 Herrick Lane
• 1974 -- Transferred Rhinelander Agricultural Research Station to the Experimental Farms Office
• mid1970s -- Up until now, offered PhDs only on a joint major basis with other depts.
• mid1970s -- Plant Breeding and Plant Genetics major founded
• 1989 -- New "outdoor classroom garden" [Allen Centennial] under construction by "Old President's House"

Don't lose your work...
Archive it in MINDS@UW!

P. 7 "At the time of his retirement [Ray H.] Roberts was working with substances extracted from green plants by immersing them in refined oil. Storing the oil and dissolved material in a freezer resulted in small quantities of crystalline material forming in the bottom of the container. Roberts obtained growth regulator effects from his "anthogens," and at one time proposed he had isolated the flowering hormone, florigen. The crystalline substance was supposed to suppress skin cancer formation in mice. Unfortunately, the crude method of extraction apparently resulted in different materials being extracted at different times and perhaps several compounds being mixed. In any event, chemists were never able to identify any specific substance, and thus the work was all lost when Roberts, in failing health, left the department."

P. 19 "Unfortunately, no accurate record of successful advanced degree candidates has been maintained over the years. Before 1950 there were few graduate students, but after 1950 the number of enrolled graduate students has ranged from 30-60 in all semesters with about half being masters degree candidates and half PhD candidates. Over 100 PhDs were granted between 1950 and 1988 and a greater number of masters degrees."

[Cranberry image from UW-Madison Department of Horticulture website]

New research tool: Alt-Press Watch

Alt-Press Watch:

• Added 11/17/08 for all UW-Madison faculty/staff/students or on-site library users
• Articles from 190+ magazines and local newsweeklies
• Contains full-text articles, unlike Alternative Press Index (abstracts 250 publications)

Selected publications:

• Alternatives Journal
• E: the Environmental Magazine
• Earth First!
• Econews
• Environment
• Foreign Policy in Focus
• Global Pesticide Campaigner
• High Country News
• In These Times
• The Isthmus
• Mother Earth News
• Multinational Monitor
• New Internationalist
• Plenty
• Rachel's Democracy & Health News
• Utne Reader
• World Watch