Thanks for visiting the new version of the Encyclopedia of Life. It looks very similar, but we have been adding some new features. The list below should give you an idea of what's new, and we would be pleased to receive any ideas or comments through the forum or by contacting us.

• The infrastructure and architecture have been significantly revamped and improved - you may not see any difference on the web pages, but technically we can now handle a lot more traffic. It's like we put a brand new engine under the hood with more power and reliability.
• If you have an account with EOL, you can now interact with the site by adding comments to a species page or any text description or image. Look for the comments icon next to images and descriptions and the new "species comments" tab in the media panel (see the screenshot below). Signing in is not required to view comments.





• With an EOL account, you can also tag any image you want, and then search for your tags later to find images and their related species. Once an image has been tagged in the same way by several different people, the tag is "promoted" to a public tag and is visible and searchable by anyone.



• The search box now has a radio button allowing you to toggle between names and tag searches.



• If you don't yet have an EOL account, you can now log in using any OpenID account -- saving you from having to remember yet another username and password. If you are a Flickr, Yahoo, AOL user (and others too!) you already have OpenID.
• We now distinguish materials that have not yet been vetted from content that has come from experts or that has been checked by experts. Unvetted content is marked with yellow. You can elect to exclude or include unvetted content by using the slider on any species age or through the preferences menu on the top menu bar.
• We've opened up the site to image contributions. By adding your photos to the EOL Flickr Group, we can pull them in and show them on species pages. Until the curator network is up and running, images descriptions that are contributed by users are clearly marked as "not reviewed" with warnings and yellow shadings (see below). The default setting is to not show this information, unless you decide to view it.




• You can now use the slider under the image to indicate your preference for showing "authoritative" information or "all" information. The default setting is "authoritative", but if you select "all" information, you will also see the clearly marked images and text that have not yet been reviewed. The top right of the page will always show what mode you are in (see below). If you have an EOL account, you can save your settings for the next time you log in.



• We've added more species across the spectrum of life, greatly improving our coverage amongst the most popular searched for species.
• The attribution model for images and text is now expanded to include everything we know about the source of the data.
• We can now show pages for new species and species not recognized by the Catalogue of Life, our default classification. For all pages, we clearly indicate the source of the name just underneath it and also indicate if the new name has not yet been reviewed, using the same yellow shading color as for images and text (see the not yet reviewed name below as an example).



• The initial version of the curator toolkit will allow curators to review information and indicate its status. We will post a message on the web site when we are ready to accept applications for curators.
• Download CoolIris if you haven't got it -- once the plugin is installed, you can click their icon () in your browser when you are on any page, and this will open up all the images in the CoolIris media panel.
• A new registration system for content partners will help us to expand EOL more quickly.
• The home page now has a news feed you can subscribe to with your favorite RSS reader. Look for the RSS icon ().
• By clicking a link above the classification browser, you can change the display of names from scientific (the default) to common names.




• We now offer search suggestions for common terms.
• And many more improvements waiting to be discovered...

Enjoy the new site and let us know what you think on the forums!

- The EOL Team