Organizing and archiving private collections of tape recordings

Many readers of this journal have accumulated large numbers of recordings of wild animals that now sit unused on their shelves. We would like to argue that these recordings have continued value and we outline a way by which they can be shared with the greater research, education and outreach communities. The arguments for sharing these recordings are very straightforward. Everyone who has attempted to record the auditory signals of animals in the wild is aware of how difficult this task can be. Despite the difficulty, the many articles in this and related journals on animal acoustical signals attest to the success that can be achieved with careful technique and proper equipment. The cost of quality recording is that any one of us is likely to record only a limited number of species. Clearly, there are many broad questions about signal evolution, function, phylogeny and ontogeny that can be solved only if researchers have access to a broader range of recordings than they can themselves collect. The obvious answer is shared archiving of our individual recording collections with one of the natural sound collection centres. These institutions have as their function the preservation of representative acoustical signals from as many extant taxa as possible and the sharing of these archived materials with researchers, wildlife management staff, educational programmes and the media. Many researchers hesitate to provide copies of their recordings to one of these centres for one or both of two reasons: (1) they do not think their recordings are needed or valuable; or (2) they think it will be too complicated or time consuming to make such a contribution. In this note, we hope to persuade all of our colleagues that both suppositions are false. Are my recordings superfluous? The answer is a strong no. Given the abundance of articles on bioacoustical topics and the many television programmes featuring wild animal signals, one might think that existing archives had no need of more material. This is totally false. Not only are many taxa not yet represented in any collection, but we have only begun to provide representative recordings of each component in the repertoires of even commonly recorded species. Data on geographical variation and ontogenetic stages are very poorly represented for the majority of taxa. There is thus a very high probability that your recordings will fill critical gaps in current archives. There are other reasons why archiving your recordings centrally is an important thing to do. With the rapid loss of species world-wide, recordings from each species should be archived in sites where there is a guarantee that they will be preserved for the long term. Once extinct, there will be no chance to record rare species. Second, there are ethical reasons for central archiving. For example, where studies of ontogeny require hand-reared animals, central archiving is more likely to alert researchers that recordings needed for a study are already available, and thus reduce the numbers of animals that need be manipulated. Finally, sound recordings are the basic substrate on which many publications are based, and many journals now encourage authors to make copies available on Web sites. While we applaud making these raw data available for inspection by other researchers, storage is then decentralized across the many journal Web sites. It is very difficult to compare sounds even if from the same taxon and studied by the same researcher when articles are published in different journals and sample sounds are stored on multiple Web sites. It seems much more useful to deposit all voucher samples and raw data in one of the centralized archives Correspondence: Jack Bradbury or Gregory Budney, Library of Natural Sounds, Laboratory of Ornithology, Cornell University, 159 Sapsucker Woods Road, Ithaca, NY 14850, U.S.A. (email: [email protected]). D. W. Stemple is at the Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, U.S.A. D. E. Kroodsma is at the Department of Biology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, U.S.A.