News from the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC)

[Steven Bird]

Dear community,

There have been a number of notable developments with OLAC in recent weeks.

OLAC WEBSITE

  The website has been completely restructured, providing much easier access
  to OLAC information and documents.  Please see it for yourself by visiting
  http://www.language-archives.org/.  We welcome your feedback.

OLAC LAUNCH

  OLAC will be officially launched at an OLAC symposium to take place at
  the 76th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, in the San
  Francisco Hyatt Regency, 3-6 January 2002.  The symposium will include
  presentations from Helen Aristar-Dry, Gary Simons, Megan Crowhurst,
  Chu-Ren Huang, Brian MacWhinney, Mark Liberman, Gary Holton and Steven
  Bird.  The launch will mark the freezing of the OLAC metadata set for a
  one year period of experimentation.

OLAC SEARCH ENGINE

  The OLAC prototype search engine now harvests 9,000+ records from ten
  archives: LDC, ELRA, DFKI, TDProject, Perseus, ANLC, APS, LACITO, CBOLD
  and AISRI.  Test it out using the search field at the top of the OLAC
  pages.  (In time this engine will be hosted at linguistlist.org).

NSF E-MELD PROJECT

  Anthony Aristar at Wayne State University and colleagues at Eastern
  Michigan University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University
  of Arizona, have been awarded a $2 million NSF grant to develop a public
  digital archive of endangered language data.  The archive will employ
  OLAC metadata.

OLAC PRESENTED IN EUROPE AND ASIA

  OLAC was presented in a workshop at the 39th Annual Meeting of the
  Association for Computational Linguistics (Toulouse, July).  Next month,
  OLAC will be presented by Chu-Ren Huang (Academia Sinica, Taiwan) in a
  workshop at the 6th Natural Language Processing Pacific Rim Symposium
  (Tokyo, November 2001).


For full details and more news, please consult the OLAC website at
http://www.language-archives.org/

Best wishes,
Steven (& Gary)
________
Steven Bird, University of Pennsylvania (sb at ldc.upenn.edu)
Gary Simons, SIL International (gary_simons at sil.org)
OLAC Coordinators (www.language-archives.org)