Branner Blog

This is still quite new, but from an initial glance, the Encyclopedia of Earth looks pretty interesting. The EoE is intended to be the wikipedia for the earth and environmental sciences, but with restricted access and oversight. The premise is that although the Internet is great, it’s also vast and unreliable. The EoE on the other hand, promises to be something of an antidote (as we hope to be here at Brannerblog as well).

Some details from the site:
“The Encyclopedia is a free, fully searchable collection of articles written by scholars, professionals, educators, and experts who collaborate and review each other’s work.”

“digital information on the environment is characterized by an abundance of “great piles of content” and a dearth of “piles of great content.” In other words, there are many resources for environmental content, but there is no central repository of authoritative information that meets the needs of diverse user communities. Our goal is to make the Encyclopedia of Earth the largest reliable information resource on the environment in history.”

See the about page for even more.

It’s an interesting idea. I have some initial critiques (like: limited searching capability–why no advanced search?), but I’m going to temper them until I’ve had more time to play with it.