Database design for an archive of animal sounds

Attached to several museums worldwide are sound archives, units dedicated to collecting, preserving, and making available to others recordings of animal sounds. In the case of the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics (BLB) at The Ohio State University, most recordings in the archive are the products of research by staff and students. The users of the collection include scientists, governmental agencies, and commercial enterprises. In this article we describe our efforts to build a modern database that describes the sound recordings in our care at the BLB.