Over his more than 40 years as a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), William Watkins led the effort to collect and catalog the vocalizations made by marine mammals. In the last decade of his career, he strove to digitize as many of his recordings as possible, with the goal of making them publicly available.
Screenshot of William Watkins Marine Mammal Sound Database Homepage
Watkins passed away in 2004, but his ambition for his collection has finally been realized. With support from the WHOI Marine Mammal Center, a team from WHOI has launched the online, open access William Watkins Marine Mammal Sound Database. Bill Watkins helped pioneer the field of marine mammal bioacoustics, developing the first tape recorder that could withstand being taken out to sea. During his long career at WHOI, Watkins made thousands of hours of underwater recordings of whales, dolphins, and other marine animals.
[Clip]
In all, the audio archive includes sounds of more than 60 species recorded over seven decades by Schevill, Watkins, and other scientists, among them G. Carleton Ray, Douglas Wartzok, Melba and David Caldwell,Kenneth Norris, and Thomas Poulter.
[Clip]
The William Watkins Marine Mammal Sound Database includes approximately 1,800 complete master tapes, along with more than 10,000 extracted digital sound clips. The metadata files list the common and scientific name of the species heard on each recording, as well as the date and geographic location where the animals were recorded, and other information noted by the researchers.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stable Diffusion XL Turbo Generates AI Images In Real-Time (via The Decoder) ChatGPT ChatGPT Can Reveal Personal Information From Real People, Google Researchers Show (via VICE) Coalition ...
From an IPA Post: At the Guadalajara International Book Fair, two new reports have been published which provide data on over 70 publishing markets around the world: the Global Publishing ...
From the Joint Statement: In 2012, DataCite and STM drafted an initial joint statement on the linkability and citability of research data. With nearly 10 million data citations tracked, thousands of repositories ...
American Library Association ALA Announces the 2024 Class of Emerging Leaders British Library British Library Hack: Customer Data Offered For Sale on Dark Web (via BBC) Canada Montreal Libraries Will ...
From the City of Pittsburgh: The Records Management Division of the Office of the City Clerk and City Council is pleased to announce the launch of a City Archives Digital ...
From the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) AI Special Interest Group: The purpose of this working document is to set out considerations relevant for libraries developing a ...
From a scite Blog Post: We’re excited to enter a new phase of our journey at scite by coming together with Research Solutions. The motivation behind this decision was our desire ...
Association of Research Libraries ARL Annual Salary Survey 2022 Reports Data on Professional Positions in Member Libraries Citations Mendeley Shares “The Most Popular Citation Styles” DORA: Declaration on Research Assessment ...
From a NOAA Release: NOAA’s National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP) launched a new data visualization tool, which will provide free and easy-to-access information on the status of U.S. coral reefs. ...
From the Associated Press: A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were ...
From the National University of Singapore: On the 164th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s magnum opus, all known surviving pages of the rough draft of Origin of species have been published online. Three recently ...
Academics Can We Identify Prominent Scholars Using ChatGPT? (via Scientometrics) Bias ChatGPT Replicates Gender Bias in Recommendation Letters (via Scientific American) Datasets ChatGPT Generates Fake Data Set To Support Scientific ...