This article briefs agricultural librarians on three key aspects of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a disease involving the virtually total disappearance and presumed annihilation of the adult bee population of hives: (1) the yearly multibillion dollar importance of honeybees as the nation's key crop pollinators and the annual $200 million domestic production and export of honey; (2) the more common bee diseases and well-known hive stressors that current theories of CCD suggest interact with each other in some as yet undetermined combination, perhaps including new pathogens to which most American bees have limited or no immunity; and (3) several bees other than the honeybee that are not currently affected by CCD and that have some potential as partial substitute pollinators for some crops.Tony Stankus, Life Sciences Librarian and Professor, University of Arkansas Libraries MULN223E,

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We provide a comparative analysis of the references to books in two free online encyclopedias that have very different philosophies about authorship and editorial oversight that may affect the nature and academic respectability of the books they list. These encyclopedias are the loosely edited, non-refereed Wikipedia, where anonymous authors, whose credentials are uncertain, compile the reference list and where many equally anonymous readers can later alter the reference lists, and its peer-reviewed companion Scholarpedia, which features signed articles by invited experts who control its reference lists. We compared 47 entries dealing with the brain or behavioral sciences that had exactly matching titles. We report relative number of book references overall, the age of these references, and those titles that were multiply cited, either through citations in both online encyclopedias or multiple entries in either one of them. We compare the percentages of book references allotted to matching subject categories. We note the distributions of references according to book publishers and compare propensities for citing high-level research volumes versus introductory textbooks and popularizations. Finally, we examine the credentials of the authors of the cited works, providing information on the universities and disciplines in which their authors or editors received their doctoral degrees and their most current academic or professional affiliation. We conclude that in this