Birds of North America Online is an 18,000 page encyclopedia covering the life histories of North American birds. We provide online, subscription-based information on all aspects of the biology and ecology of our continent`s breeding birds.

Two key issues prompted us to launch the Birds of North America Online (BNAO). The first was the completion of Birds of North America (BNA) as a paper encyclopedia, in 2002; the Lab of Ornithology was a partner in developing BNA. The second was the realization that we needed to keep this valuable publication alive and up-to-date, and that putting BNA online was the ideal way to do that. BNAO is needed because it is the only source of life-history information on North American birds. Someone starting a research project or a term paper on North American birds can trun to BNAO and quickly find the information they need, saving days of research time pulling together this information from disparate sources. BNAO has done that. The populations most affected by the development of BNAO are reflected in our subscribers: academic and public libraries, government agencies, and individual reserachers and bird watchers.

The first step in making BNA content available to an online audience was to mark it up in machine language (XML) and add rich media (video and sound), that latter available thru the Macaulay Library here at the Lab of Ornithology. All this was completed by late in 2004. The next step was to create an efficient way to update BNA`s content. With help from the National Science Foundation (NSF), we are developing the architecture to allow editing of BNAO species accounts online. To do this we will take advantage of the large community of scholars and researchers who created BNA paper -- over 500 of them. This group remains committed to BNA and the online environment provides an efficient way to harnass that energy. We expect to have our online editing system in place by the fall of 2006.

Over 2000 individual birders and researchers have subscribed to BNAO in the past year, along with 100+ academic and public libraries and dozens of government agencies. We expect this base to grow substantially as we move BNAO into its new phase with a growing body of new content.

• Private/Other (e.g., unrestricted funds, commodity groups, foundations, companies)
• Subscription revenues

• Steve Kelling
• Christine Crane
• Rick Moore