Animal behavior is central to the ecological and evolutionary processes that create and maintain biodiversity, as well as to the delimitation of taxonomic boundaries. Increasingly researchers are collecting media specimens (i.e., audio and video recordings) that document behavior and hold enormous scientific value, particularly when associated with physical voucher specimens. And yet, vouchered audio/video recordings currently are a resource that is underappreciated, vastly underutilized, and prohibitively under-curated. In large part, this is because most biological collections lack the specialized equipment, infrastructure, and expertise needed to digitize, preserve, store and manage audio specimens, and audio archives capable of handling audio specimens are often isolated from traditional natural history collections such that recordings often are not linked cleanly to their physical voucher specimens. We present examples of the value of such media specimens, as well as these curatorial challenges, and also discuss on-going developments that will enhance media specimen accessibility and value. These include digitization methods and standards, best practices for the field and archive, and specimen database connections that tie together associated specimens housed in different collections. Importantly, we call for increased dialogue among biodiversity informatics researchers, taxonomists and other researchers associated with biological collections, and animal behavior researchers working in the field. A key goal should be to build a collaborative partnership between “traditional” biological research collections and archives with expertise in preservation of media specimens. Such a partnership will establish a system to facilitate the ability of researchers to access the broadly distributed specimens they need, allow partner collections to make accessible digital audio recordings associated with their specimens, and also encouraging further growth of the scientific resource.