As member of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) Executive Committee, Serageldin was invited to the 2012 Meeting organized by the Biodiversity Committee, Chinese Academy of Sciences, held in Beijing on 25 and 26 July 2012. The Committee members, who are senior figures from the cornerstone institutions of the international initiative, convened to discuss future plans for the EOL as it soon enters into its sixth year of providing global access to knowledge about life on Earth.
The EOL is 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. It 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.
The Library of Alexandria is one of 13 international institutions that have signed memoranda of understanding to become part of the global EOL community. In cooperation with the EOL, the Library is developing an Arabic interface of the Encyclopedia, which will be a rich biodiversity resource for Arab scientists in the region. It will not only comprise translated species from EOL into Arabic, but also entails adding species pertaining to the Arab world onto the EOL.