History of the Macaulay Library

The Future of the Library

A major promise of digital libraries is the opportunity to federate multiple archives through common interfaces and software interpreters. Thus the Macaulay Library with its rich media collections of animal behavior could federate with more traditional museums containing photographs and morphological data on preserved specimens, genetic data banks listing the genomic codes for the same species, and ecological archives summarizing range maps, demographic profiles, and community structure roles.

A user of the main web page for such a federation could do a search at a single interface and have rapid and transparent access to diverse types of data pooled from across the federation archives. In many ways, such a system would provide the ultimate realization of Doc Allen's goal of documenting the biology of birds and other animals. It would also expedite his other goal, which threads throughout CLO's history, of providing abundant and digestible information that can further outreach and public information about nature. This is where the Macaulay Library seeks to go and we are well on our way.