This document provides instructions for creating and managing communities on the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) website. It explains that communities allow users to collaboratively organize and share collections of species information. Users can create communities, add collections, invite members, grant manager roles, and communicate via a community newsfeed. Communities and collections are accessible via a user's EOL profile page.

1. Using the Encyclopedia of Life
Creating a Community

2. About Communities
You can create a community space on EOL to collaboratively
manage or communicate about one or more of your EOL
Collections. Collections allow you to organize lists of species,
information, media, maps, and sounds - anything of interest
to you from the Encyclopedia of Life- in a virtual collection,
that you can annotate and share.

3. Creating a Community
Once way you can share a collection with others by creating a Community. You can
do this by clicking on the create community button.
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4. Editing Your Community
Give your community a name, description and invite other EOL members to join. You can
add other collections to your community as well. Therefore, the name of your community
does not have to match the name of the collection is was created around.
Enter in a name and
description for your
community
Invite other EOL users to
join your community
Click here to create your
community Home

5. Inviting Members
When you invite members to join your EOL Community, they will receive a message in
their EOL Watch List Newsfeed with a link. Once they join, you will have the chance to
“promote” them to become Managers of your EOL Community. You can also let people
know the web address for your community (e.g., http://eol.org/communities/63) and
they can join by clicking on Join this community.
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6. Join a Community
To join a community, click on the “Join this community” button.
Once you have joined you will see a yellow confirmation message.
The community you have joined will also appear in your Watch List.
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7. Once you have joined you will see a yellow confirmation message.
The community you have joined will also appear in your Watch List.
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8. Sharing Collection Management
All users on EOL will be able to join your community, but only those members to
whom you grant "manager role " status will be allowed to edit the community
itself or the collection associated with your community.
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9. Community Newsfeed
The newsfeed allows members of the community to communicate with each other
and reports changes to collections items within the community. You will be notified
of any activity via email. You can edit your email settings to choose when you
receive alerts.
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10. How do I access my Communities?
To access a list of your EOL Collections and EOL Communities you belong to, visit your
EOL Profile and click the either the collections or communities tab.
Click here on any EOL
page to go to your profile
Click to view your
collections and
communities
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11. Questions?
If you have any problems or
questions, please email us at:
education@eol.org
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