[1] CBOL's Secretariat Office is hosted by the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC.
Barcoding was proposed in 2003 by Prof. Paul Hebert of the University of Guelph in Ontario as a way of distinguishing and identifying species with a short standardized gene sequence.
Since then, more than 200 organizations from more than 50 countries have joined CBOL and agreed to put their barcode data in a public database.
[2] CBOL helped to plan and launch the global campaigns to barcode all species of fish and birds, and socioeconomically important groups like fruitflies.
One of CBOL's primary contributions to the success of barcoding was its outreach efforts to government agencies (agriculture, environment, conservation, and others) and international organizations (CITES, Convention on Biological Diversity, Food and Agriculture Organization) that could benefit from barcoding.