For Science, Broadcasting, and Conservation: Wildlife Recording, the BBC, and the Consolidation of a British Library of Wildlife Sounds.

After World War II, wildlife recordists and bioacousticians took advantage of advances in electronics and acoustics to collect, store, and analyze recordings of animal vocalizations, leading to the establishment and expansion of numerous wildlife sound archives worldwide. This article traces the technological, organizational, and social arrangements that transformed a private collection of recordings by wildlife recordist Ludwig Koch in the 1930s into one of the largest sound archives of its kind. It argues that this sound archive was consolidated through the collective efforts of a recording community-an unlikely alliance of academic biologists, commercial and amateur hobby recordists, and the public service broadcaster British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), each with a stake in the development, use, and popularization of wildlife recordings. Zooming in on the integration of British naturalists with the BBC, the article shows how, despite scientists' oft-noted suspicion of the media, these parties developed a mutually beneficial association.

Trading twitter: Amateur recorders and economies of scientific exchange at the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds.

Scientists have long engaged in collaborations with field collectors, but how are such collaborations established and maintained? This article examines structures of collaborative data collection between professional scientists and various field recorders around the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds. The Library collects animal sound recordings for use in education, preservation, and entertainment, but primarily in the scientific field of bio-acoustics. Since 1945, the Library has enlisted academic researchers, commercial recorders and broadcasters (such as the British Broadcasting Corporation), and amateur sound hunters in its expansion. I argue that the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds managed to craft and sustain a crucial network of contributors through creative and strategic brokering with its collection of recordings/data. Drawing on notions from exchange theory, I show that sound recordings were valued not just as scientific data, but also as copyrighted commodities that could be bought, sold, traded, and converted in a range of economic, social, and symbolic capitals within collaborators' respective social fields. Thus, aligning collaborators' interests, these exchange relations enabled the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds to negotiate amateur recorders' reliability, willingness to share work, and commitment to scientific standards, as well as the bonds that solidified their collaboration with the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds. Attending to the micro-economics of data exchange, this article thus brings into perspective the multi-dimensional processes through which data-flows are managed.