Evolution 2008, Day 3: Encyclopedia of Life

I just heard a talk about the Encyclopedia of Life, a project to put up a page for every named species. They already have something like a million pages up, though many are stubs.

Another aspect of their project is to digitize every publication touching upon taxonomy. That reminded me of a draft post I’ve had hanging for a bit over a year now; I’ll put it up shortly. In any case, they estimate that there are some 80 million pages of pre-1923 taxonomic literature, and something near 400 million pages of taxonomic literature total, and that they have already digitized about 1% of the literature in the year or so that they’ve been operating.