Living Collections: Biocuration in the Broadest Sense (Biology Today) (Report‪)‬

From where 1 live, it takes me about an hour and a half to get into Manhattan, so I like to get as much done as I can while I'm there. A couple of weeks ago, the New York Hall of Science was sponsoring a lecture on the new online Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) at the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park. I decided to start uptown with a visit to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). I hadn't been there in awhile and I wanted to spend some time in their temporary exhibitions, but most of all, I wanted to revisit the dioramas. Though I hadn't planned it for anything more than travel convenience, these two stops turned out to be closely linked because they both dealt with collections of living things. It might seem that the AMNH represents the old style of collecting and the EOL the new, but I don't think things are that clear-cut. First of all, the AMNH is one of the partner institutions in the EOL, which I learned is a huge and very complex project involving several different endeavors and a host of sponsors. The presentation at the National Arts Club was given by Cathy Norton, Deputy Director of the BioDiversity Heritage Library, one of the key components of the EOL. In this column, I don't want to get bogged down in the intricate organization of this project, but I will mention a few facts that I found interesting, because they helped me make sense of a number of online collection projects I've learned about, and used, over the past few years. I hope this information will also prove useful to you, because these resources are only going to get better and more essential to biologists in the years ahead-but don't worry, I'll also get back to the dioramas.