Corn!
See These Sources To Learn More

Reference librarian Felecia Tyler at the ARS National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., recommends these sources as starting points for those who want to learn more about corn.

More than 600 links to articles, images, and more about corn are offered at the National Science Foundation-funded National Science Digital Library (tinyurl.com/NSDL-corn).

Need help understanding corn genetics? See the science tutorial at the Plant and Soil Sciences eLibrary (tinyurl.com/UNL-corn) for self-directed lessons. You’ll put what you learned to good use when you step up to the compilation of scientific articles in the Public Library of Science’s PLoS Genetics: 2009 Maize Genome Collection at www.plos.org/cms/node/498.

Younger viewers may delight in The Great Corn Adventure, from the University of Illinois Extension (tinyurl.com/greatcorn). Teachers of 4th or 5th graders will want to know about Corn in the Classroom from the Kentucky Corn Growers’ Association (tinyurl.com/KYcorn). And kids of all ages will enjoy the National Agricultural Library’s fun and informal Popcorn: Ingrained in America’s Agricultural History (tinyurl.com/NALpopcorn), which takes a nostalgic look at one of the nation’s all-time favorite snacks.

Browse these corn industry sites for a quick backgrounding: Corn Refiners Association (www.corn.org), National Corn Growers Association (www.ncga.com), and the “Choose Ethanol” site of the Renewable Fuels Association (ethanolrfa.org/index.php).

The Alternative Uses page of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Corn Information venue identifies more than a half-dozen trade and research organizations that are developing new uses for corn (tinyurl.com/altcorn).

Explore two more sites to see what online corn resources the National Agricultural Library has chosen for its ever-expanding AGRICOLA (AGRICultural On-Line Access) database. Choose from more than 500 online books, reports, and the like at go.usa.gov/i75, or select from more than 5,000 articles from scientific journals and related publications at go.usa.gov/i7n.—By Marcia Wood, Agricultural Research Service Information Staff.

"Corn! See These Sources To Learn More" was published in the September 2010 issue of Agricultural Research magazine.

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