As one of the governance participants of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), Serageldin meets today with the other members of the EOL to discuss its future governance, and to recommend a governance model that fosters international participation.
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, a kind of mission very close to Serageldin’s heart, and one very much akin to that of the Library of Alexandria.
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.