The Cornell Lab of Ornithology houses the world’s largest collection of audio and video recordings of animal behavior. Although not all of their recordings are available online, they are continuously digitizing new material with the ultimate goal of making these recordings available for education, conservation, and research around the world. Along with the recordings themselves, their website contains information about how to make animal behavior recordings, possible uses of the recordings, the history of the archive and potential future directions, and archival methods.
Collection Principles
The online portion of this collection contains streaming audio and video recordings of birds and other animals in nature. Recordings are contributed by staff but also, in large part, by hundreds of amateur and professional “recordists” from around the world. The archive aims to collect the most comprehensive collection of animal behavior recordings possible. Although recordings from contributors are, to some extent, serendipitous in nature, the lab also actively seeks to complete their collection by taking annual “Big Expedition” trips to different regions and by posting a list of “Most Wanted Species.” They also see a value in obtaining numerous recordings for the same species, as this can help highlight different behaviors practiced at different times as well as geographic variation within species. Presumably the lab does have some limitations on the number of duplicates and type of submissions it will accept, but I was unable to find an explicit description of this policy.
Object Characteristics
The archive is an effort of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology; therefore their main strength is in recordings of bird behavior. However, they also have hundreds of recordings of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and insects. Recordings available for streaming are mp3s and QuickTime movie files. The search function brings up records both for digitized recordings and those that have not yet been digitized. Although none of the recordings are immediately available for download, you can order recordings from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for a fee (as a non-profit, this is simply a processing fee, and is discounted for educational purposes); this applies to all recordings regardless of whether or not they have already been digitized.
Metadata
The metadata provided is more robust for certain recordings than others, but overall is sufficient. Search results include the catalog number, common name of animal subject, scientific name of animal subject, location of recording, recordist’s name, date of recording, length, and quality rating for each recording. Further metadata is provided through a link to the catalog number, including confidence rating (confidence that the recording is a representation of the animal it purports to be), further information about the geographic location (such as elevation, latitude, longitude), what kinds of sounds can be heard (eg. clicks, whistles), person who identified the species, and date of species identification. Records also contain an icon indicating that more information is available and accompanied by the following blurb: “Over time, new fields will become public as we check our records for quality. Please contact us if you would like to view the full data.” Users are able to search by many of these parameters under the advanced search option. One problem I experienced in using the basic search function was that in some cases I searched by common name and found no results, even though a search for the same species by scientific name did bring up results (and these results included the common name!). When this happened, I did receive a tip to use scientific names.
Intended Audience
The intended audience for this website is very broad encompassing educators, researchers, environmentalists, commercial businesses, and members of the general public. The page “How to Use the Archive” details what potential uses fit under each of these categories and provide links to some case studies that other organizations have done with these recordings. The site also contains a list of scientific publications that resulted from work making use of these recordings.
This is a really interesting site! The fact that the lab receives many of its recordings from individuals not on staff means that the website is very inclusive, with lots of helpful information about how to make recordings and what you might do with recordings. Another interesting feature that I didn’t mention was their “RavenViewer” application. This is a free plug-in for QuickTime that allows you to see the spectrograms and waveform patterns of the sounds as they are played. (Having recently gone to a talk in the biology department about bird songs, I know this is one of the ways that researchers analyze these sounds.) In all of the places that I saw problems (search snafus, places where more metadata would be appropriate), there were messages indicating that these problems were in the process of being solved. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has funding lots of major sources for this archive, and they seems genuinely committed to expanding and improving it.
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