Peer review of archives in preparation for workshop

[Steven Bird]

Folks,

Please note that the archive reviews are due this Friday, 22 November.
For information on the reviewing assignments, please see:
http://www.language-archives.org/events/olac02/reviews.html
The original announcement follows.

Thanks,
Steven Bird

> Dear workshop participants,
>
> You will recall that the third goal of our upcoming workshop in December,
> as stated in the Workshop Overview on the web site, is:
>
>    3. Review: To give feedback to each participating archive on its use of
>       metadata, to review the services on the OLAC and LINGUIST sites.
>
> We have also warned you that we wanted each participant to do some
> preparatory tasks prior to the workshop, including reviewing metadata from
> three archives besides your own.
>
> Joan Spanne, the archivist for SIL International, has agreed to help us by
> collating the results of these individual archive reviews and to make a
> presentation on the "State of the Archives" at the workshop.  In addition
> to the benefit to each archive of getting constructive peer review, we
> anticipate that another key outcome will be improvements to our metadata
> guidelines and identification of more best practice recommendations.
>
> In order to facilitate this review process, we have worked with Joan to
> develop a peer review form, which is attached.  We have also worked out
> specific review assignments.  Each workshop participant has been assigned
> to review specific archives.  Consult the following web page to see which
> archives you have been assigned to:
>
>    http://www.language-archives.org/events/olac02/reviews.html
>
> The full instructions on how to perform the review are given in the
> attached review form (which is also accessible via a link at the top of the
> web page just mentioned). This should not be a time consuming process. We
> anticipate that a single review can be completed within 30 minutes. You may
> also need to spend some time familiarizing yourself again with the relevant
> OLAC standards. Links to these are given in the detailed instructions.
>
> The reviews for each archive will be collated and sent to the contact
> person for the archive as anonymous reviews.  Of course, the web page of
> review assignments gives some clue as to who reviewers might be, but it
> will be impossible to know exactly who said what, so we trust there will be
> an adequate level of anonymity.  The actual anonymity will be increased by
> the fact that there will often be reviewers in addition to the ones named
> on the assignment page. After the due date, we will ask some of you who
> have shown a knack for this sort of review to fill in some gaps left by
> reviews that may not have come in.  You are also encouraged to submit
> reviews of any additional archives you please at your own initiative.
>
> The deadline for submission of completed reviews is two weeks from today,
> FRIDAY, 22 NOVEMBER 2002.  And early returns will be appreciated, too!
> Address completed reviews to:
>
>     joan_spanne at sil.org, olac-admin at language-archives.org
>
> We look forward to good feedback from all of you.  Don't hesitate to
> contact us if you have any questions.
>
> Best,
>
> Gary Simons (and Steven Bird)