LAN Newsletter No. 8

[Nick Thieberger]

[posted on behalf of Steven Bird]

Hi there,

On 11/5/06, David Nathan <dn2 at soas.ac.uk> wrote:
> Dear colleagues
> Language Archives Newsletter (LAN) No. 8 is now available.

This newsletter contains a slightly misleading characterisation of the
difference between OLAC and IMDI metadata.  On page 6 it says:

> OLAC  was developed as an extension of the Dublin Core  (DC) set
> which is widely used by librarians and for generalised cataloguing of
> web documents. The IMDI set was designed in collaboration with
> linguists, speech engineers and others to serve the speciic needs of those
> researchers, especially resource discovery and retrieval,
> and is correspondingly more comprehensive.

OLAC metadata is not widely used by librarians, nor is it used for
generalised cataloguing of web documents.  OLAC metadata is used to
"describe language resources and to provide associated services" [1].
It has been created and refined by the community over a series of
events [2].  Its main benefit for end-users is resource discovery,
such as via a Google-style search interface [3].

The main difference with IMDI metadata is that the latter is much more
detailed.

[1] http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/metadata.html
[2] http://www.language-archives.org/about.html
[3] http://www.language-archives.org/tools/search/

-Steven Bird