The Chicago Tribune has an article today announcing an ambitious new online reference project, the Encyclopedia of Life. The project will entail a multiyear effort to catalog all of Earth’s species, with each species getting its own Web page and a consistent treatment and format. An astonishing $50 million has been pledged by various cultural and philanthropic organizations for the project; the resulting resource will be free. Apparently, articles will be written and vetted by scientists. It sounds like a fantastic resource, and at the same time it underscores the difficulty facing traditional reference publishers. When the site gains enough content mass, there won’t be much need for libraries to purchase traditional animal life encyclopedias. Having been a part of one terrific such set, the 2nd edition of Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia for Gale, this saddens me. As the head of a fledgling independent reference publisher, I also know that there are still multiple areas where our expertise in producing quality reference works can be of use and can result in good, viable projects. Our job in the coming years will be to find those publishing opportunities and address them with creativity and passion. One thing is clear: the trend toward free, scholarly Internt reference sources–the kind not as easily dismissed from a validity standpoint as Wikipedia–will continue.