This project seeks to make accessible and promote usage of the world’s largest archive of rich media recordings of animal behavior. Three key communities of users are K-12 educators, wildlife management programs, and biological researchers. Access was achieved by digitizing the archive and designing advanced web tools for search, recovery, playback, and visualization. Promotion was achieved by a) working with two K-12 curriculum design programs to use animal behavior topics as springboards for education in physics, chemistry, biology, and economics; b) working with the marine animal bioacoustics community to design search and recovery tools specific to their needs; and c) designing annotation tools for recordings that allow researchers to find and measure specific traits in recordings.

The Macaulay Library in 1999 was already the world`s largest archive of animal behavior recordings, but inaccessible to users except through hard copy distribution. Urgent needs by wildlife managers worldwide made the current system a bottleneck. Digitization and online tools were the obvious solution to make this resource available worldwide. In addition, personal experience in teaching had shown that animal behavior was an effective way to get students interested in less popular topics (e.g. physics).

As of this date, over 109,000 audio and 39,000 video recordings of animal behavior are digitized and accessible, for free playback and usage, online at the Macaulay Library website. Search, playback, and visualization tools are working and available to all users. K-12 curricular development is ongoing with several initial drafts in pilot testing in NY State. Marine animal and avian recordings are now widely tapped online by wildlife management and US Navy-supported research programs.

Wildlife management programs, TV and radio media stations, educators, researchers, museums and zoos, and the general public can all now access the rich media archive at the Macaulay Library. The software developed by the Macaulay Library for online visualization and playback was awarded second prize for Interactive Media in the 2006 National Science Foundation/Association for the Advancement of Science "Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge" competition.

animal behavior