Photographs, illustrations, video, and sound – and any information provided with them -- can hold clues to species characteristics, behaviors, and ecology, as well as to species locations, impacts as invasive species, etc.  Such resources are already being collected by many media galleries and online share sites, and many have tags attached that carry some useful information.  But for the media resource to be truly useful to researchers, resource managers, decision-makers, and educators, detailed information that follows standards is needed, as well as quality control protocols.  Several online galleries are now treating photographs and other media as biological resources – encouraging contributors to provide information such as species, date, location (including coordinates), context of the image, related resources, notes, etc - following standards when possible. They are also striving to provide additional tools to aid the discovery and management of information.  With the diversity of media types and with the breadth of biological subjects, however, there are many challenges in creating one operable media gallery, much less creating interoperable media services among data networks, which is being sought by many organizations and agencies.  Issues include: 1) managing any pre-existing digital editing (how much is allowed?); 2) ensuring correct species identification (initially, and then as names change); 3) decreasing the time needed to input detailed information; 4) determining standard vocabularies; 5) keeping up with the evolving nature of media; and 6) following global copyright laws. 

Results/Conclusions

I present a review of the lessons learned by the National Biological Information Infrastructure Library of Images From the Environment (NBII-LIFE; <life.nbii.gov>), and then an overview of some of the recent developments in national and international standards and protocols for making media resources into useful and exchangeable biological datasets.