The Cornell Lab of Ornithology will convene a meeting of experts and stakeholders to address the challenges of archiving audiovisual data for the biological sciences. Audiovisual data useful to modern biological research (a.k.a. "media specimens") are recordings (audio, video, still images) of organisms in their natural habitats, collected by researchers and citizen scientists to create records of observations of biodiversity and animal behavior. Standards and best practices have not been widely adopted for such audiovisual data, particularly in the biological sciences, and most existing data archives and biological research collections lack the expertise and infrastructure to manage it. At the same time, biologists and other researchers are collecting vast amounts of such data, and this trend is increasing as recording technologies become more sophisticated and inexpensive, such that large scale research projects are based in part or in whole on media data (e.g., bioacoustic monitoring projects). Audiovisual data (audio and video recordings) require substantial "hands on" time for processing, large storage capacity for large files, rich descriptive metadata, and constant migration to new formats as technologies change.
Participants in the meeting will develop a white paper that addresses explicitly the challenges of making audiovisual data broadly accessible and provide a framework that identifies and prioritizes key steps to reduce the likelihood of the loss of important data. Finally, several graduate students and postdocs will participate in the meeting itself, thereby providing a valuable experience and enhancing their training and background in data archiving and accessibility.
