ARKive - Multimedia, Internet, 5,000 Endangered Species and Schools (Overview and Work in Progress)

This paper reports on the research in progress of the ARKive Education, Project a multimedia database on endangered species, which will be available to schools over the Internet. ARKive will be part of Wildscreen World. This is an element of a large millennium project in Bristol. It is supported by Wildscreen, BBC, HTV, Hewlett Packard, WWF, Wildlife Trusts and others. The Paper describes the project and the research conducted thus far and reviews some of the major factors impacting on the development of the project. It discusses the complexities of developing large (5,000 + species) multimedia resources for environmental education for all age and ability ranges and provides some initial results of the research.