ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the database that underpins Barcoding of Life Data Systems (BOLD). The designers of BOLD have summarized that the data system does three things for BOLI: it acts as a repository; it acts as a workbench; and it acts as a tool for collaboration. The chapter explains this three-fold task-scape as a way of organizing more cultural and philosophically oriented analysis. As BOLD grows larger, materially and in the scientific imagination, as an exciting and accessible accumulation of life and knowledge of life, the issue of ongoing biodiversity loss complicates ethics of care. BOLD is described by its own designers as a repository for specimen and sequence records. A broader 'democratic' project of global collaboration, shaping not only the archiving but the imagined material protection of living biodiversity, lies in the hands of BOLD's designers; but as a future question.
