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For further information, contact the MBL Communications Office at (508) 289-7423 or e-mail us at comm@mbl.edu
Embargo: 10 a.m. EST / 3 p.m. GMT, Tues. Feb. 26
Contacts: Terry Collins, +1-416-538-8712 or +1-416-878-8712, terrycollins@rogers.com
Diana Kenney, Marine Biological Laboratory, +1-508-289-7139; dkenney@mbl.edu
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Background on EOL
The EOL Steering Committee is comprised of senior authorities from Harvard University, Smithsonian Institution, the Field Museum of Chicago, the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, the Biodiversity Heritage Library consortium, Missouri Botanical Garden, and the MacArthur and Sloan Foundations.
The EOL Institutional Council contains more than 25 institutions from around the world and provides EOL with global perspectives and outreach capabilities. The Distinguished Advisory
Board consists of 13 global leaders from the scientific and policy communities.
Driving the EOL forward as well are several working groups:
The Species Sites Group works with scientists and other contributors to assemble and authenticate the species pages content. It recruits diverse data providers and engages expert page “curators” of information on the species pages. The group is also implementing a robust intellectual property regime that ensures open access to EOL materials. Finally, the team is developing portals for specialized audiences.
The Biodiversity Informatics Group is responsible for the software establishing a single portal to reach volumes of species information scattered worldwide, seamlessly aggregating data from thousands of sites using novel tools to capture, organize, and reshape biodiversity knowledge. In collaboration with data providers, the group is obtaining, indexing, and recombining information for expert and non-expert users alike. The next step involves deploying a suite of tools and services to index, organize, and associate data elements or create new elements.
Members of the Biodiversity Informatics Group, which is based at the MBL, include: David J. (Paddy) Patterson, Biodiversity Informatics Leader; Jennifer Schopf, System Architect; Patrick Leary, Portal and Aggregation Project Leader; Peter Mangiafico, Research and Development Project Leader; David P. Shorthouse, WorkBench Project Leader; Pam Fournier, Information Technology; Alexey Shipunov, Union Project Leader; Sarah Bordenstein, Content Manager; Jon Ferguson, Scientific Informatics Analyst; Kristen Lans, Office Manager.
Technology giants, including Adobe, Microsoft and the Wikimedia Foundation, are providing active support.
The Scanning and Digitization Group is led by the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a consortium of 10 natural history and botanical libraries, which have already digitized more than 2.5 million pages of biodiversity literature and made them available as part of a public commons. Citizens of all nations have access to this wealth of information free of charge and of most copyright and licensing restrictions. This combination of access to primary texts and literature and the ability to use it freely enables individuals everywhere to participate locally in the global effort to catalogue new species and protect existing biodiversity.
The Education and Outreach Group works to insure widespread awareness of the EOL, and to explore and promote new and exciting uses of this extraordinary resource in diverse global settings. The group strives to make EOL relevant, usable and interesting to a broad range of potential users and to encourage their participation by providing tools to organize and contribute observations, media and data about the species they study.
The Biodiversity Synthesis Group supports EOL’s growth and use by facilitating cross-disciplinary involvement of the scientific and academic community and by contributing to its educational and conservation uses. Its ultimate goal is to ask, and attempt to answer, new questions about biodiversity by supporting working groups to explore integrative topics, including taxonomy, evolution, biogeography, phylogenetics and biodiversity informatics.
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