Archiving – Page 4 – Endangered Languages and Cultures

ELAR update

25 March 2012 by admin

As of this week the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS has 52 online deposits available comprising around 51,000 files. There are 12,700 data bundles in the online collection, of which 6,000 are available to any registered user and a further 5,000 require access approval from the depositors. The number of users is now 515 … Read more

Retrofitting a collection? I’d rather not

25 March 201212 March 2012 by Nick Thieberger

I just had a visit from a student wanting to deposit a collection of recordings made in the course of PhD fieldwork in the PARADISEC archive. It is a great shame that they are only just now thinking about how to deposit this material, as it will need considerable work to make it archivable. If they had sought advice before doing all of the research (or looked at the PARADISEC page ‘Depositing with PARADISEC’, or looked at the RNLD pages, e.g, http://www.rnld.org/node/40) it would have been so much easier for all of us. Why?

The latest stats at PARADISEC

8 March 20128 March 2012 by admin

PARADISEC now holds 177 collections containing 7,516 items and 59,083 files that are 5.59 TB in size. There are 3,310 hours of audio recordings in the collection. The catalog of these collections can be viewed via the Australian National Data Service, or the Open Language Archives Community or the Virtual Language Observatory.

Since our last report, Nick Fowler-Gilmore, the Audio Preservation Officer in the Sydney office, has completed the digitisation of Calvin Roesler‘s tapes (CR1) the last of which were his 1959 recordings in Asmat. See the fieldnotes and a summary of the collection at http://www.paradisec.org.au/fieldnotes/ROES/web/ROES001.htm.

ELAR turns 50

2 March 20121 March 2012 by admin

The latest, and fiftieth, deposit to go online at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) is Trevor Johnson’s magnificent Auslan Corpus. Auslan is Australian Sign Language and the corpus consists of over 900 bundles (including over 850 video recordings) of one hundred native or near-native deaf signers filmed in pairs between mid-2004 and mid-2007 in five … Read more

Sustainable data from digital research – presentations available

22 February 2012 by Nick Thieberger

In December 2011 PARADISEC hosted a conference titled ‘Sustainable data from digital research: Humanities perspectives on digital scholarship’. Presentations from that conference are now available as audio or video downloads from the following repository: http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/7890. Ten of these presentations also include a peer-reviewed chapter in the conference proceedings.

See below for an RSS feed of all titles and links in the The University of Sydney eScholarship Repository

PARADISEC’s 2011

11 January 201211 January 2012 by Nick Thieberger

This year at PARADISEC our collections grew as follows:

January 2011 / December 2011
159/172 collections
6,972 /7,422 items
46,900 /58,680 files
5.02 /5.46 TB
2880:25/3185:43 hours

We are always in negotiation with prospective depositors about collections, for example, we are working with Theodore Schwartz to accession his wonderful 1950s Manus (PNG) recordings (made with Margaret Mead) and have accessioned John Harris’s PNG recordings from the 1960s. Not all negotiations are successful however. For example, we offered to work with the Basel Kultur Museum to digitise Fr. John Z’graggen’s 500 tapes from the Madang region of PNG, but so far that offer has not been taken up.

We continue to be an exemplary five-star Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) collection, which means our metadata is among the few OLAC archives with the highest quality rating. The content of the metadata relies on depositors, so we have focused on making it as easy as possible for a minimal metadata set to be entered and then enhanced over time. Our metadata is also harvested at the collection-level by the Australian National Data Service.

Great Andamanese deposit launched

16 December 2011 by admin

Tuesday 13th December saw the launch at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS of the archival deposit of Great Andamanese language materials submitted by Anvita Abbi, who is currently Leverhulme Visiting Professor in the Endangered Languages Academic Programme. This deposit is a unique record of this highly endangered language which has just 5 remaining … Read more

Two jobs at ELAR

20 December 201116 December 2011 by admin

The Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS is seeking to fill two vacancies: Digital Content Curator — to undertake a variety of tasks with language documentation collections, from working with current and potential depositors, to processing data, to crafting content for collection presentation pages Software Developer — to extend the existing archive system to expand … Read more

Archiving at ELAR

22 September 201121 September 2011 by admin

(with corrections from Ed Garrett, 2011-09-22) In April this year I wrote a post called “Who uses digital language archives?”. This post is a short update on the current situation for the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at the School of Oriental and African Studies. ELAR was established in 2005 as part of the Hans Rausing … Read more

NRPIPA Symposium in Darwin 13-14 August 2011

11 August 2011 by Linda Barwick

Another stunning array of papers and associated performances will feature at the 10th Annual Symposium of NRPIPA (The National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia). This year there will be a focus on community databases for access to recordings. Venue: North Australian Research Unit, The Australian National University, Darwin, 13–14 August 2011 Presented in … Read more