The Macaulay Library at Cornell University is home to the world’s largest and oldest collection of nature recordings. Recently, they uploaded and made available their whole, totally searchable, archive online for free. This very interesting information came from Chart Attack in their article, “The world’s largest natural sound archive just went up online.”
In this archive, 9,000 species from across the world are documented in 150,000 audio recordings, totaling 10 terabytes and a run time of 7,513 hours.
The library has been amassing recordings from 75% of the world’s bird species. Collecting the data since 1929, they operate within the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It took the archivists a dozen years to digitize the collection.
With any digital archiving project, it is important to remember the value of a solid taxonomy. How the content is classified impacts the findability of your data. Professionals should look for an experienced builder of solid standards-based taxonomies to associate content for appropriate machine-assisted indexing. Access Innovations can provide solutions that are ANSI compliant.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
