ARKive 

Various supporters have given media, ABC Australia, the BBC, National Geographic, OSF, Bruce Coleman, FLPA, English Nature, Flora & Fauna International, IUCN - The World Conservation Union, RSPB, UNEP-WCMC The World Conservation Monitoring Centre,  WWF.

Hewlett-Packard, UK's Heritage Lottery Fund, UK's New Opportunities Fund, UK Government's Department of the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA)

Specially designed database with Open Archival Information System by Hewlett-Packard

Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com) has provided £1.2 million (US $2 million) of hardware, software and technical professional services to develop ARKive's technical infrastructure

Endangered Species

As wildlife habitats undergo continued destruction, placing more and more species on the verge of extinction, the race is on to digitally preserve them and simultaneously boost public awareness. The aim of ARKive is to preserve information about such species for posterity as well as help educate the public by creating a centralized, online audio-visual record of the world's endangered species - a resource that will highlight global biodiversity. To make ARKive material accessible to all audiences - from all ages and expertise levels to all technology bandwidths and devices.

Collection of media comes from a variety of sources. For example, as natural history filmmakers go around the world, many species they film become extinct, and while the footage taken is edited for commercial entertainment output, some critical shots, of scientific importance, could be lost.  Many specialist naturalists and clubs might have rare and important media on specific types of animals, insects and plants. The UK government's Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs – DEFRA, commissioned ARKive to compile an on-line identification guide for corals listed in the CITES database.
An aggregate and store of media is available online for some of species. HP built both a Media Accessions System, for digitising, cataloguing, and tracking the assets and a Media Vault for storing, managing, and transcoding the assets and related metadata. To maximize the usability of ARKive a strong approach has been taken to metatagging the ARKive as and there are many layers of information that have to be catalogued as each asset is added to ARKive. The metadata needs to describe content-specific information related to the species, the activity being shown in each video or still and the media asset themselves.  The ARKive team created its own XML schema for the metadata. The schema draws upon numerous existing guidelines and standards including METS, the OAIS Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System, NISO technical metadata for still images, the EBU Core metadata set for radio archives, the RLG working group on preservation issues of metadata, MPEG 7, and the Dublin Core. To effectively deal with the capabilities of varying devices and clients, the ARKive system enables the automatic generation of a variety of formats and sizes of media.

ARKive is the Noah's Ark for the Internet era - a unique global initiative, gathering together into one centralised digital library, films, photographs and audio recordings of the world’s species. ARKive is leading the ‘virtual’ conservation effort - finding, sorting, cataloguing and copying the key audio-visual records of the world’s animals, plants and fungi, and building them into comprehensive and enduring multi-media digital profiles. Using film, photographs and audio recordings, ARKive is creating a unique record of the world’s biodiversity - complementing other species information datasets, and making a key resource available for scientists, conservationists, educators and the general public.
There are currently three ARKive websites: the main ARKive website, Planet ARKive and ARKive Education. These repurpose ARKive's core information for different user groups: adults, children and educators. All three sites have been developed with accessibility and ease of use in mind, with all images and recordings viewable no matter what type of internet connection is used. There are two main databases; the globally endangered chapter - featuring the world's endangered and protected species and the British chapter - featuring endangered, protected and common species.

To cover the rest of the world's most endangered species (6,000 animals and 33,000 plants) according to the World Conservation Union's (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species.  For each endangered species in the ARKive system there hopes to be 10 minutes of better-than-broadcast-quality video footage, stored in an uncompressed format at 27 MB per second - roughly 40 times that transmitted for digital TV. Alternative versions will also be created and stored for access by various devices and audiences. The total storage requirement could exceed a Petabyte (1 followed by 15 zeros or 50,000 home PC's). ARKive will be a unique asset to current and future generations, providing rich, and where appropriate, scientifically significant, media records of endangered species, some of which may already be extinct.

Technology lessons learnt
There have been challenges in dealing with vast repositories of digital assets and rich media; a complex infrastructure was needed and there were usability issues including the archiving, metatagging, and retrieval processes necessary to efficiently access assets. The technology challenges posed by a project on the scale of ARKive break down into several key factors: the scale of the media to acquire, the complexity of the metadata, the variety of media types, the complexity of workflows, issues of storage management and preservation, and the need to repurpose media in many formats and bandwidths.