Cool new tools let public contribute to massive interactive online biodiversity en...(onsolidating information on species EOL ...)

Says Jesse Ausubel, Vice-President, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation: "The idea of an Encyclopedia of Life now seems so natural that people cannot believe that the EOL does not already fully exist. Even with the magic of the Internet, lots of blood, sweat and tears stand between the more than 150,000 well-represented species and the future when 1.8 million species will gaze out at us from www.eol.org. The work of growing EOL is gratifying, and the progress is visible week to week."

"With new content and tools in place, EOL is open for business as never before. And we intend to harness the eyes and collective brainpower of hundreds of thousands of users to spot intriguing new information, share observations, and enhance EOL's role as a leading provider of accurate and relevant biodiversity information," says EOL Executive Director James Edwards, based at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

"Collecting all of Earth's species together in one place is an extremely ambitious undertaking, as only Noah knows," adds Dr. Edwards. There are literally thousands of websites dedicated to individual aspects of biodiversity - to amphibians, plants or ants, for example, or to specific geographic areas. This unique collaboration between more than 100 leading international organizations is making vast amounts of information available in a common format, allowing users to more readily identify new species across different taxa and regions."

Milestones in recent months:

• EOL partner The Biodiversity Heritage Library has now digitized more than 15 million pages of world biodiversity literature. Links let users access these references directly from an EOL species page. The BHL is also developing search algorithms to automatically find
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