ABOUT THE FAST PLANTS® DIGITAL LIBRARY

The Wisconsin Fast Plants® Program’s Digital Library is a portal for browsing, searching, and cataloging resources in the following broad categories:
  • About the Fast Plants® Digital Library
  • Brassica rapa Research Resources
  • Educational Resources
  • News and Opportunities
  • Photos and Drawings
  • Rapid Cycling Brassica rapa Seed Stocks information
  • Videos

Our Digital Library includes a Login option that makes it possible for users to rate and/or contribute online resources to the library.

The Fast Plants® Digital Library can include any resources that fall into one of the above categories and are freely available for use online or to download.

Items cataloged into our Digital Library are turned into highly searchable and annotated resources. All selections are made because of their particular applicability for teachers, learners, or researchers using Fast Plants as a model organism, the Brassica butterfly (Pieris), or materials from our sister program, Bottle Biology.

CWIS Digital Library Software
The Fast Plants Digital Library uses CWIS software. CWIS (pronounced see-wis) is software to assemble, organize, and share collections of data about resources, like Yahoo! or Google Directory but conforming to international and academic standards for metadata. CWIS was specifically created to help build collections and connect them into NSF's National Science Digital Library (NSDL), and the Wisconsin Fast Plants Digital Library was accessioned into the NSDL in 2010.

Some of the features of the Fast Plants Program’s Digital Library include:

  • resource annotations and ratings (a la Amazon)
  • keyword searching (with phrase and exclusion support a la Google)
  • fielded searching
  • recommender system (a la Amazon)
  • RSS feed
  • user interface themes

Policies and Guidelines
This work by The Wisconsin Fast Plants® Program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. All materials on the Wisconsin Fast Plants website are free to use for non-commercial, educational use only. You may not use this Content in a defamatory or derogatory manner.

Publisher/provider: University of Wisconsin - Madison

Please Credit the Wisconsin Fast Plants Site:
Lauffer H. B., Lauffer, D., Williams, P., (2012). Wisconsin Fast Plants® Program. Retrieved (fill in the date you visited our site), from Wisconsin Fast Plants® Program Web site: www.fastplants.org.

Developed and Designed by: Swarming Technology

Digital Library Terms
(adapted with permission from DLESE*)

Cataloging
The process of providing metadata information for a resource that enables discovery.

Categories
The first order division of metadata fields for the Fast Plants® Digital Library metadata framework. Categories are made up of fields.

Collection-level metadata
Metadata that describes the overall characteristics of a grouping of item-level metadata records. This information includes who maintains the collection, how many resources are in the collection, what type of resources are in the collection and what is the scope of the collection.

Controlled vocabularies
Words or phrases that catalogers use to complete metadata information. Use of common words and phrases ensures better searching capabilities for library users.

DC
Dublin Core - the full name and acronym are Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI). The Dublin Core metadata element set is a commonly used standard for cross-domain information resource description.

Fields
The smallest division within a metadata framework. Fields become elements in a DTD or schema. Fields become tag sets within XML documents when the field is surrounded by a "<" and a ">" sign.

Harvest
Electronic file transfer over the Internet of metadata records between repositories. A primary method of transfer is to use the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

Metadata
Descriptive information (e.g. title, description, audience, geospatial coverage, keywords) that can be used to describe, index, and discover learning resources for particular user needs.

NSDL
National Science Digital Library for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.

* DLESE (Digital Library for Earth System Education) Glossary of Terms and Acronyms from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). http://www.dlese.org/documents/glossary.php. Accessed 2012-03-20.

Acknowledgements
Wisconsin Fast Plant resources are made available openly through the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Content created on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The Wisconsin Fast Plants Program continues to make new resources available through support from a variety of grants and projects, and we also continue to support those Fast Plant resources developed over the 25-years of our program's activity. Please share your comments and recommendations as you use and refine Fast Plant materials. It is through feedback and collaboration that our resources continue to grow and improve.

For Digital Library Geeks
This Digital Library uses a modified GEM Subject taxonomy and Dublin Core schema.

Fast Plants® is a registered trademark of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
Website Developed and Designed by: Swarming Technology