[Corpora-List] Guidance Needed for Corpus Building

[Daniel Yacob]

Greetings,

I'm at the very starting point of compiling an Amharic corpus
comprised of a large number of files and word lists in my
possession.  I'm investigating starting my own project vs
joining an existing effort.

I have found lots of information from the LinguistList site
and in particular "David Lee's Bookmarks for Corpus-based
Linguists".  However, it is a lot of info to sort thru and
I can not evaluate well the usefulness of some resources.
For example, the "XML Corpus Encoding Standard" looks promising
but documentation has not changed in nearly 3 years -is it
widely used or a dead project?  The Linguistic Data
Consortium appears to have the right goals but is also
subscription based -?  I want to keep the data available freely.

I would be grateful if people here could send recommendations
for tools to use and references for groups active in
developing free corpus materials.

thank you,

Daniel