LSA Annual Meeting Albuquerque 2006

[Jeff Good]

> Baden wrote:
> I think it also depends on what we see "OLAC Outreach" as being. If for
> example, it is to promote the OLAC metadata set, the creation tools and
> information discovery infrastructure, that is quite different to "data
> management for linguists".
> ----
> For me it's all pretty much of a muchness. We want field linguists to
> produce materials of lasting value. OLAC is kind of a flag we can
> wave to demonstrate our common views on standards and such. It's helpful
> for people to have the sense that there is a common framework out
> there and that they know what it is (more or less). That's very relevant
> for data management, although of course, data must be managed whether
> it's going into an archive or not.

Baden brings up a good point--and I think we need to re-evaluate every few
years just what OLAC Outreach is. My own sense, right now, is that I agree
with Heidi's assessment (once I looked up "much of a muchness"). At least
today, the linguists I know tend to be very "project"-based. They're
documenting their language and want to produce a dictionary or whatever.
If we're lucky, they know about OLAC and E-MELD, but don't know the
difference between the two. (It's the same tired old faces in both groups,
at any rate.) They're not thinking about breaking down their project into
metadata issues, and database issues, and recording issues--they're
thinking about that dictionary.

If these tutorials are properly structured, eventually, people may
probably conceive of documentation differently (if they attend...). But,
for now, I think OLAC Outreach should be geared towards making people
think about the whole arena of archiving the way OLAC does, and the field
simply isn't in a position for us to just focus on the piece of the
archiving puzzle OLAC has officially alloted itself.

But, of course, this is just my view (in 2005). If anyone else has
different ideas, please let us know. And, this is clearly something to
discuss from time to time. Hopefully, by 2015 or so, we'll have all sorts
of groups putting on tutorials, and then we can focus on the specifically
OLAC bits.

Jeff