Meeting: Advancing the Accessibility of Digital Media for Biological Research in the 21st Century

康奈尔鸟类学实验室将召开一次专家和利益相关者会议，以解决将生物科学的视听数据存档的挑战。对现代生物学研究有用的视听数据(也称为“媒体标本”)是研究人员和公民科学家收集的生物在其自然栖息地中的记录(音频、视频、静止图像)，以创建对生物多样性和动物行为的观察记录。这类视听数据的标准和最佳做法尚未得到广泛采用，特别是在生物科学领域，而且大多数现有的数据档案和生物研究收藏缺乏管理这些数据的专门知识和基础设施。与此同时，生物学家和其他研究人员正在收集大量这样的数据，随着记录技术变得更加复杂和廉价，这一趋势正在增加，以至于大型研究项目部分或全部基于媒体数据(例如，生物声学监测项目)。视听数据(音频和视频记录)需要相当长的处理时间、大文件的大存储容量、丰富的描述性元数据，以及随着技术变化不断向新格式迁移。会议与会者将编写一份白皮书，明确阐述广泛获取视听数据所面临的挑战，并提供一个框架，确定减少丢失重要数据的可能性的关键步骤并确定优先顺序。最后，几名研究生和博士后将参加会议，从而提供宝贵的经验，并加强他们在数据存档和获取方面的培训和背景。

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.