Program Booklet

Created to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the start of the United States Civil War, this exhibit studies the political, military, and social aspects of the conflict. Exhibits cover such wide-ranging topics as women soldiers, children and the war, Civil War journalism, literature and nursing, Civil War music, African American soldiers and sailors, the Civil War diary of Lyman Chittenden, and Civil War technology. The Coles County and the Civil War exhibit covers Coles County soldiers, the Charleston Riot, and Abraham Lincoln’s relationship with Coles County. This exhibit has been created by the librarians and staff of Booth Library

Curation Micro-Services: A Pipeline Metaphor for Repositories

The effective long-term curation of digital content requires expert analysis, policy setting, and decision making, and a robust technical infrastructure that can effect and enforce curation policies and implement appropriate curation activities. Since the number, size, and diversity of content under curation management will undoubtedly continue to grow over time, and the state of curation understanding and best practices relative to that content will undergo a similar constant evolution, one of the overarching design goals of a sustainable curation infrastructure is flexibility. In order to provide the necessary flexibility of deployment and configuration in the face of potentially disruptive changes in technology, institutional mission, and user expectation, a useful design metaphor is provided by the Unix pipeline, in which complex behavior is an emergent property of the coordinated action of a number of simple independent components. The decomposition of repository function into a highly granular and orthogonal set of independent but interoperable micro-services is consistent with the principles of prudent engineering practice. Since each micro-service is small and self-contained, they are individually more robust and collectively easier to implement and maintain. By being freely interoperable in various strategic combinations, any number of micro-services-based repositories can be easily constructed to meet specific administrative or technical needs. Importantly, since these repositories are purposefully built from policy neutral and protocol and platform independent components to provide the function minimally necessary for a specific context, they are not constrained to conform to an infrastructural monoculture of prepackaged repository solutions. The University of California Curation Center has developed an open source micro-services infrastructure that is being used to manage the diverse digital collections of the ten campus University system and a number of non-university content partners. This paper provides a review of the conceptual design and technical implementation of this micro-services environment, a case study of initial deployment, and a look at ongoing micro-services developments

Daily Erosion Project: Daily estimates of soil erosion and water runoff

Soil erosion and water runoff drive water quality degradation and are liabilities to crop production, yet their magnitude is neither quantified nor inventoried for US agricultural areas. This project’s goals are to: (1) estimate soil erosion and surface runoff across the Upper Midwest as contributors to soil and water degradation and (2) inventory these quantities for the next several years

Program Booklet

Created to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the start of the United States Civil War, this exhibit studies the political, military, and social aspects of the conflict. Exhibits cover such wide-ranging topics as women soldiers, children and the war, Civil War journalism, literature and nursing, Civil War music, African American soldiers and sailors, the Civil War diary of Lyman Chittenden, and Civil War technology. The Coles County and the Civil War exhibit covers Coles County soldiers, the Charleston Riot, and Abraham Lincoln’s relationship with Coles County. This exhibit has been created by the librarians and staff of Booth Library

Curation Micro-Services: A Pipeline Metaphor for Repositories

The effective long-term curation of digital content requires expert analysis, policy setting, and decision making, and a robust technical infrastructure that can effect and enforce curation policies and implement appropriate curation activities. Since the number, size, and diversity of content under curation management will undoubtedly continue to grow over time, and the state of curation understanding and best practices relative to that content will undergo a similar constant evolution, one of the overarching design goals of a sustainable curation infrastructure is flexibility. In order to provide the necessary flexibility of deployment and configuration in the face of potentially disruptive changes in technology, institutional mission, and user expectation, a useful design metaphor is provided by the Unix pipeline, in which complex behavior is an emergent property of the coordinated action of a number of simple independent components. The decomposition of repository function into a highly granular and orthogonal set of independent but interoperable micro-services is consistent with the principles of prudent engineering practice. Since each micro-service is small and self-contained, they are individually more robust and collectively easier to implement and maintain. By being freely interoperable in various strategic combinations, any number of micro-services-based repositories can be easily constructed to meet specific administrative or technical needs. Importantly, since these repositories are purposefully built from policy neutral and protocol and platform independent components to provide the function minimally necessary for a specific context, they are not constrained to conform to an infrastructural monoculture of prepackaged repository solutions. The University of California Curation Center has developed an open source micro-services infrastructure that is being used to manage the diverse digital collections of the ten campus University system and a number of non-university content partners. This paper provides a review of the conceptual design and technical implementation of this micro-services environment, a case study of initial deployment, and a look at ongoing micro-services developments

Artificial Light at Night Causes Top‐down and Bottom‐up Trophic Effects on Invertebrate Populations

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.1. Globally, many ecosystems are exposed to artificial light at night. Nighttime lighting has direct biological impacts on species at all trophic levels. However, the effects of artificial light on biotic interactions remain, for the most part, to be determined. 2. We exposed experimental mesocosms containing combinations of grassland plants and invertebrate herbivores and predators to illumination at night over a three-year period to simulate conditions under different common forms of street lighting. 3. We demonstrate both top-down (predation controlled) and bottom-up (resource controlled) impacts of artificial light at night in grassland communities. The impacts on invertebrate herbivore abundance were wavelength dependent and mediated via other trophic levels. 4. White LED lighting decreased the abundance of a generalist herbivore mollusc by 55% in the presence of a visual predator, but not in its absence, while monochromatic amber light (with a peak wavelength similar to low pressure sodium lighting) decreased abundance of a specialist herbivore aphid (by 17%) by reducing the cover and flower abundance of its main food plant in the system. Artificial white light also significantly increased the food plant’s foliar carbon to nitrogen ratio. 5. We conclude that exposure to artificial light at night can trigger ecological effects spanning trophic levels, and that the nature of such impacts depends on the wavelengths emitted by the lighting technology employed. 6. Policy implications. Our results confirm that artificial light at night, at illuminance levels similar to roadside vegetation, can have population effects mediated by both top-down and bottom-up effects on ecosystems. Given the increasing ubiquity of light pollution at night, these impacts may be widespread in the environment. These results underline the importance of minimising ecosystem disruption by reducing light pollution in natural and semi-natural ecosystems.The research leading to this paper was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 268504 to KJG

A Comparative Study of the ReCell® Device and Autologous Spit-Thickness Meshed Skin Graft in the Treatment of Acute Burn Injuries.

Early excision and autografting are standard care for deeper burns. However, donor sites are a source of significant morbidity. To address this, the ReCell® Autologous Cell Harvesting Device (ReCell) was designed for use at the point-of-care to prepare a noncultured, autologous skin cell suspension (ASCS) capable of epidermal regeneration using minimal donor skin. A prospective study was conducted to evaluate the clinical performance of ReCell vs meshed split-thickness skin grafts (STSG, Control) for the treatment of deep partial-thickness burns. Effectiveness measures were assessed to 1 year for both ASCS and Control treatment sites and donor sites, including the incidence of healing, scarring, and pain. At 4 weeks, 98% of the ASCS-treated sites were healed compared with 100% of the Controls. Pain and assessments of scarring at the treatment sites were reported to be similar between groups. Significant differences were observed between ReCell and Control donor sites. The mean ReCell donor area was approximately 40 times smaller than that of the Control (P < .0001), and after 1 week, significantly more ReCell donor sites were healed than Controls (P = .04). Over the first 16 weeks, patients reported significantly less pain at the ReCell donor sites compared with Controls (P ≤ .05 at each time point). Long-term patients reported higher satisfaction with ReCell donor site outcomes compared with the Controls. This study provides evidence that the treatment of deep partial-thickness burns with ASCS results in comparable healing, with significantly reduced donor site size and pain and improved appearance relative to STSG

Climate Change Impacts on Iowa, 2010

Climate change is already affecting the way Iowans live and work. Without action to mitigate these effects, our future responses will become more complex and costly . The following policy recommendations are offered as initial steps to help safeguard our state’s economy, environment, and residents