Colleagues, I'm looking for some examples of communities of volunteers that help amalgamate a collection of materials rather than create them. The example we are examining is the Encyclopedia of Life, which aggregates data from many different scientific databases (and user-generated content such as Flickr images) into a coherent whole. The participants are called "curators" and their main role is to validate and approve content rather than create it. They also do a lot of work to integrate the original content into a coherent whole. What similar examples exist on the web today? What examples have existed for decades or centuries? Thanks ahead of time for any examples or thoughts. Derek Hansen Assistant Professor iSchool University of Maryland