How do you catalogue 1.8 million species in one single volume of an encyclopedia? The answer is: you don’t, or at least not in the classical meaning of the word. There is however a more practical alternative than storing an entire library in your home, and that is the online “Encyclopedia of Life”, an ambitious project that has been unveiled at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in California.

The curiosity of taking a sneak preview of how the encyclopedia will look like made the computer servers to crash within hours, after the site (www.eol.org) received more than 11 million hits in the first six hours of launch. So far scientists listed 30,000 species, hoping to list the remainder of 1.7 millions within the next 10 years.

The ambitious project, valued at $100 million, is just one of the numerous attempts that have been made over the years to catalogue all known forms of life, and hopefully will have better chances of succeeding than the other ones. What is truly amazing about this project is that it involves not only scientists, but also regular people, who will be able to contribute to the Web site through pictures, videos or facts that might be of interest.

The encyclopedia will begin with fish, amphibians and plants species, and will continue over the years, with information that could prove useful to both specialists and people who access the site for pure curiosity. At the same time, the project could be a starting point for new studies regarding biodiversity and why not, could inspire people to get involved more with protecting endangered species.

“The launch of the Encyclopedia of Life will have a profound and creative effect in science,” said Harvard Prof. E.O. Wilson in a stement. “It aims not only to summarize all that we know of Earth’s life forms, but also to accelerate the discovery of the vast array that remains unknown. This great effort promises to lay out new directions for research in every branch of biology.”