Despite the abundance of electronic corpora now available to researchers,
corpora of natural speech are still relatively rare and relatively costly. This paper suggests reasons why spoken corpora are needed, despite the formidable problems of construction. The multiple purposes of such corpora and the involvement of very different kinds of language communities in such projects mean that there is no one single blueprint for the design, markup, and distribution of spoken corpora. A number of different spoken corpora are reviewed to illustrate a range of possibilities for the construction of spoken corpora.