Encyclopedia of Life Meeting at Smithsonian
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As a member of the Executive Committee of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), Dr. Ismail Serageldin, Director of the Library of Alexandria, attends the committee meeting held at the Smithsonian Institution this week. The Committee members, who are senior figures from the cornerstone institutions of the EOL, convene to consider EOL accomplishments thus far, and to discuss future plans and goals.
The EOL is a new project to create an online reference source and database for every one of the 1.9 million species on our planet that are currently known to science. Ultimately, it will be a collaborative effort of tens of thousands of people with expertise around the world. The goal of the EOL is to make knowledge about all the world’s organisms freely available to everyone.
The EOL was founded upon a Memorandum of Understanding among six cornerstone institutions: the Smithsonian Institution, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Museum of Comparative Zoology of Harvard University, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.