Archival Methods

From Reel to Digital

For over 80 years the Macaulay Library (formerly the Library of Natural Sounds) has been a leading natural history audio archive - an analog audio archive. That is, all of our holdings were preserved on in analog format on magnetic tape. Unfortunately, even the best magnetic tape stored under ideal conditions has a limited shelf life and accessing recordings on individual tapes is time consuming, so we opted to digitize our collection. The enormous task of digitizing took off in 1999, with help from generous grants from the National Science Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

In 2001, the archive expanded to include video recordings of animal behavior. The expansion has been funded by grants from the office of Naval Research (particularly the NOPP program), generous individual gifts from members of the Lab of Ornithology Board of Trustees, and by corporate partnerships with Sony, Canon, Apple Computer, Exabyte, EMC and Videobank.

For all our recordings, we maintain the highest standards for preservation, specimen creation, editing, quality control, storage and output.

Learn more about the audio archival process or the video archival process.