PARADISEC

[Nicholas Thieberger]

Dear Anlangers,

I am writing to ask you to consider depositing language material with 
PARADISEC.

The Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered 
Cultures (PARADISEC, http://paradisec.org.au/) has been operating for 
three years and has a collection of digital material totaling 2 
terabytes. This includes some 1200 hours of audio and video recording.

We provide a free service of longterm backup for work in progress. We 
particularly would like to preserve digital copies of dictionaries, 
text collections and grammars as these will be of use in future for 
local language projects.

There are 3,280 records in PARADISEC catalogue 
(http://paradisec.org.au/catalog ) with data on 570 languages from 50 
countries including: American Samoa, Australia, Bangladesh, Botswana, 
Cambodia, Chile, China, Cook Islands, Fiji, French Polynesia, 
Greenland, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, 
Japan, Kiribati, Republic Of Korea, Lao People's Democratic Republic, 
Madagascar, Malaysia, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mexico, Federated 
States Of Micronesia, Myanmar, Nauru, Nepal, New Caledonia, New 
Zealand, Nigeria, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, 
Reunion, Samoa, Singapore, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Taiwan, 
Province of China, Thailand, Tonga, Uganda, United States of America, 
Vanuatu, Viet Nam, Wallis And Futuna

Typical data
The Niue dictionary
Stephen Wurm's several hundred tapes, including 120 1970s Solomon 
Islands tapes and transcripts/fieldnotes
Arthur Capell's 114 tapes, Pacific and PNG 1950s (and 30 archive 
boxes of fieldnotes)
Bert Voorhoeve's 180 tapes - West Papua
Tom Dutton's 295 PNG tapes

Metadata
Our metadata is entered via an online form 
(http://paradisec.org.au/catalog ) and a subset conforms to OLAC 
guidelines. It is periodically exported to a static repository for 
searching via OLAC or LinguistList. We have a geographic entry form 
that allows us to store geographic references together with each 
metadata item.

Imaging fieldnotes
To date over 14,000 pages of fieldnotes and associated papers  have 
been photographed and most are now online. See example: 
http://paradisec.org.au/fieldnotes/AC2.htm

PARADISEC has developed a workflow for digitization of analog field 
recordings and for accession of current digital field-recordings. We 
are cited as an exemplar using Digital Mass Storage Systems in the 
International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) 
Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio 
Objects (IASA-TC04). Aarhus, Denmark: International Association of 
Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA), 2004, p. 51.  The Sub 
Committee on Technology of the Memory of the World Programme of 
UNESCO recommends these guidelines as best practice for Audio-Visual 
Archives.

I look forward to hearing from you,

All the best,

Nick Thieberger
-- 

Project Manager
PARADISEC
Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures
http://paradisec.org.au


nicholas.thieberger at paradisec.org.au
Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
University of Melbourne
Vic 3010
Australia

Ph 61 (0)3 8344 5185
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