encyclopedia of life

Great new resource for all you scientastically curious infomaniacs. The EOL looks to be a great new reference guide to help classify and understand life, the universe, and everything. Well, maybe just life.

In a nutshell:

Welcome to the first release of the Encyclopedia of Life portal. This is the very beginning of our exciting journey to document all species of life on Earth.

Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about all life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goals are to:

Create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike.

Transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating virtually all known data about every living species.

Engage a wide audience of schoolchildren, educators, citizen scientists, academics and those who are just curious about Earth’s species.

Increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.

Chock-a-block full of images, species overviews, a massive table of contents of each species, it’s taxonomic outline in multiple formats (text, graphical, source), and extensive references to all cited material, this online project, now in its beginning stages, is shaping to be an immensely useful and accessible resource for all future biologists and lovers of life.

One concern is that it may end up something similar to wikipedia, in which anyone can submit anything of questionable quality. I suppose submission won’t really be the problem but rather the means by which the material is reviewed and approved by the administrators for scientific acceptability. As one can see, the institutions involved in this undertaking are rather scientifically serious about what they do, so getting this right is fairly important. But as it already has established data partners to aid in verifying, safeguards are presumably in place.

Think of this as a renewable source of information and info-seeking behavior. We are only aware of approximately 1.8 million species on earth. How many more millions are still undiscovered and in desperate need of cataloging and classification?

LibraryThing’s OSC

I’ve been meaning to write something about LibraryThing for awhile; it’s a very cool site that brings together people who share an interest in captivating stories. How to find them, those who read them, the ways we catalog and organize them, and simply appreciating them.

LT is self-described as “the world’s largest book club”. That may be so, as it is undeniably a social networking site connecting readers and librarians and publishers the world over. The vast amount of members connecting through the interesting libraries, friends, groups and comment options to which one can subscribe enable limitless interactivity with members and their representative collections. This would be LibraryThing’s strength.

LT is countering this strength by embracing a new challenge. It is seeking to replace, gradually, the Dewey Decimal System by developing a scheme called the Open Shelves Classification, a modern, collaborative, and free organization of published works. Certainly it is an ambitious, long-term project requiring great innovative thinking, though it’s not meant to be the end-all-be-all solution for classification but rather simply a newer, better method to be replaced by future classifiers.

I have no doubt that LT will summon the people power to think out and deliver such a lofty goal; indeed, I think it should be attempted in the old tried-and-true interest of simply seeing if it can be done. I do have, however, a slight pinch of skepticism which I admittedly cannot yet find the source. Maybe it’s because LT has got such a good thing going already. Is it trying to be everything for book fans too quickly? Has it developed a strong enough membership of librarians/organizers/catalogers/OCD-ers to lend sufficient and adequate input for achieving such a goal? Can being too collaborative actually prevent the OCS from taking flight?

Since this is an experiment, I suppose that my questions will be buried within the OCS pudding that will eventually manifest itself. All in all, I like the audacity LT promises with itself in simply being an experiment. I think that’s where where the success is seen…asking questions and seeking answers…not necessarily the answers you want to see, either. See, librarians can be scientists too…right?