From olac-admin at language-archives.org Sat Sep 27 10:56:53 2003 From: olac-admin at language-archives.org (Steven Bird) Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2003 20:56:53 +1000 Subject: News from the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) Message-ID: Dear Community, Here is a summary of the developments in the Open Language Archives Community since our last general news posting in June. Full details are available at: http://www.language-archives.org/ OLAC COUNCIL FORMED At the last OLAC workshop in Philadelphia (December 2002), the OLAC voting process was replaced with a council. The OLAC Council is made up of people who have experiential knowledge of OLAC and who make decisions about OLAC standards, best practices and repositories as described in the document process and registration process. The OLAC Council has now been formed, and has the following members: Anthony Aristar (LINGUIST), Chris Cieri (LDC), Gary Holton (ANLC), Chu-Ren Huang (Academia Sinica), Heidi Johnson (AILLA), Laurent Romary (ATILF), Joan Spanne (SIL) and Martin Wynne (OTA). OLAC STANDARDS ADOPTED OLAC standards concern the operation of OLAC's core infrastructure (protocols and processes) and are mostly of concern to digital archivists. After an extended period of experimentation and review by the community, the OLAC Process and OLAC Repositories standards have now been adopted. The process document summarizes the governing ideas of OLAC and describes how OLAC is organized and how it operates, including the document process and working group process. The repositories document defines the standards OLAC archives must follow in implementing a metadata repository. The metadata document is still in "candidate" status, and will shortly undergo review on the OLAC-Implementers mailing list. OLAC Process (Adopted standard, 2003-07-08): http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/process.html OLAC Repositories (Adopted standard, 2003-09-17): http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/repositories.html OLAC Metadata (Candidate standard, 2003-05-31): http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/metadata.html OLAC-Implementers mailing list: http://lists.linguistlist.org/archives/olac-implementers.html OLAC PRESENTED AT ENABLER/ELSNET ROADMAP WORKSHOP Chu-Ren Huang (Academia Sinica) presented OLAC at the ENABLER/ELSNET Workshop "International Roadmap for Language Resources", held in Paris in August. Details about the workshop, and Chu-Ren's presentation, are available at: http://www.enabler-network.org/final-workshop-program.htm ROSETTA ARCHIVE FUNDED BY US NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION The Rosetta ALL Language Archive project has been awarded close to US$1M over two years from the NSF National Science Digital Library Initiative. The project is a collaboration between the Long Now Foundation, the LINGUIST List, Stanford University, Eastern Michigan University, the Open Language Archives Community, and the Endangered Language Fund. For more information please see the award abstract: https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/servlet/showaward?award=0333727 RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS CONCERNING OLAC The following research publications concerning OLAC will appear in 2003. All are available from the documents section of the OLAC website. The Open Language Archives Community: An infrastructure for distributed archiving of language resources, Literary and Linguistic Computing 18(1), Special Issue on New Directions in Humanities Computing, 2003. Building an Open Language Archives Community on the OAI foundation, Library Hi Tech 21(2), Special Issue on the Open Archives Initiative, 2003. Extending Dublin Core Metadata to support the description and discovery of language resources, to appear in Computing and the Humanities 37(4), 2003. Seven dimensions of portability for language documentation and description, Language 79, 557-82, 2003. OLAC Documents page: http://www.language-archives.org/documents.html CURRENT OLAC ARCHIVES More language archives have implemented the OLAC 1.0 metadata format. Here is the full list of current archives: A Digital Archive of Research Papers in Computational Linguistics, Philadelphia, USA Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Australia Academia Sinica Formosan Language Archive, Academia Sinica Taipei, Taiwan Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America, UT Austin, Austin, USA ATILF Resources, Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Francaise Nancy, France Cornell Language Acquisition Laboratory, Cornell University Ithaca, New York Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International, Dallas, USA European Language Resources Association, Paris, France Flint Archive, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia LACITO Archive, Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale, Villejuif, France Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, USA Natural Language Software Registry, German Foundation for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbrucken, Germany PARADISEC Archive Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures, Australia Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Medford, USA Rosetta Project 1000 Language Archive, Long Now Foundation, San Francisco, USA Surrey Morphology Group Databases, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK Survey for California and Other Indian Languages, UC Berkeley, San Francisco, USA TalkBank, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA SIL Language and Culture Archives, Dallas, USA Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA TRACTOR Archive, Trans-European Language Resources Infrastructure, Oxford, UK Typological Database Project, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands The content of these archives can be searched using the OLAC interface on the LINGUIST List site at: http://linguist.emich.edu/olac/ (Note that some formerly-registered archives are no longer on the list as they do not conform to the OLAC 1.0 standard. Adminstrators of those archives should review the OLAC Metadata and OLAC Repositories documents, update their repositories, and re-register with OLAC.) Best wishes, Steven & Gary _______ Steven Bird, University of Melbourne (sb at cs.mu.oz.au) Gary Simons, SIL International (gary_simons at sil.org) OLAC Coordinators (www.language-archives.org)