Peer review of archives in preparation for workshop

[Gary Simons]

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)

(See attached file: review-form.txt)
(See attached file: review-form.txt)
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