News from the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC)

[Steven Bird]

Dear Community,

Here is a summary of the developments in the Open Language Archives
Community over the last year.  Full details are available at:
  http://www.language-archives.org/


OLAC SEARCH ENGINE HANDLES 2000 QUERIES PER DAY

In 2005, the OLAC Search Engine handled 824,676 queries, an average of
2259 per day or an average 68273 per month.  The most popular
languages searched for in 2005 were Dutch, English, Quechua, Arabic,
Greek, German, Chinese, and Malay.  Only 35% of queries specified a
particular archive, the majority were generic searches across all
archives. The most commonly searched repository was SIL-LCA, followed
by PARADISEC and SCOIL.  Thanks to Baden Hughes for his analysis of
the server logs.

OLAC Search Engine:
  http://www.language-archives.org/tools/search
SIL Language and Culture Archives:
  http://www.language-archives.org/archive.php4?id=35
Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures:
 http://www.language-archives.org/archive.php4?id=18
Survey for California and Other Indian Languages:
  http://www.language-archives.org/archive.php4?id=21


EMELD WORKSHOP ON DIGITAL LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION

The 2006 E-MELD workshop will focus on 'Tools and Standards: the State
of the Art.'  This annual workshop marks the culmination of the 5-year
E-MELD project; one goal of the workshop is to review digital
standards ratified by the community in prior workshops on text,
lexicons, databases, and annotation.  The workshop will be held in
June, in conjunction with the LSA Summer Meeting at Michigan State
University.

Workshop website:
  http://emeld.org/workshop/2006/


OLAC TUTORIAL AT THE LSA ANNUAL MEETING

A tutorial organized by the OLAC Outreach working group was held at
the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in January.
The focus of the presentations was on audio and video recording.
The event was officially sponsored by the LSA's Committee for
Endangered Languages and their Preservation.

Tutorial website:
  http://www.ailla.utexas.org/site/lsa_olac06.html


NEW OLAC REPOSITORIES IN 2005

Four repositories joined OLAC in 2005:
- the *Audio Archive of Linguistic Fieldwork* at the Berkeley
  Language Center, UC Berkeley, USA;
- the *Comparative Corpus of Spoken Portuguese* at IEL Unicamp,
  Campinas, Brazil;
- *The Online Database of Interlinear Text (ODIN)* at California
  State University, Fresno, USA; and
- *Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered
  Cultures (PARADISEC)*, at the Universities of Melbourne, Sydney,
  New England, and Australian National University.

Full list of OLAC Archives:
  http://www.language-archives.org/archives.php4


EMELD WORKSHOP ON DIGITAL LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION

The 2005 E-MELD workshop focussed on linguistic ontologies and data
categories as aids in linguistic annotation and as tools for the
fine-grained search and retrieval of language documentation.  It was
be held in July 2005, in conjunction with the LSA Institute at MIT.

Workshop website:
  http://emeld.org/workshop/2005/


LSA TUTORIAL ON ARCHIVING AND LINGUISTIC RESOURCES

This tutorial provided a forum where people who are compiling documentary
linguistic resources could learn about current best practices for
creating and conserving those resources.  The tutorial was organized
by Jeff Good (MPI Leipzig) and Heidi Johnson (University of Texas,
Austin and AILLA) and held at the annual meeting of the Linguistic
Society of America, in Oakland, California, in January 2005.

Tutorial abstracts and slides:
  http://www.language-archives.org//events/olac05/


RECENT OLAC PUBLICATIONS

Baden Hughes and Amol Kamat (2005). A Metadata Search Engine for
  Digital Language Archives.  D-Lib Magazine 11(2).
  http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february05/hughes/02hughes.html

Baden Hughes (2004). Metadata Quality Evaluation: Experience from the
  Open Language Archives Community.  Proc 7th Intl Conf on Asian Digital
  Libraries, Shanghai.  http://eprints.unimelb.edu.au/archive/00001408/


Best wishes,
Steven & Gary
_______
Steven Bird, University of Melbourne
Gary Simons, SIL International
OLAC Coordinators (www.language-archives.org)