Archive

Where Have All the Collections Gone?: Analysis of OLAC Data Contributors' use of DCMIType 'Collection'

Language materials, as commonly conceptualized by academics, are resources which specifically exhibit or provide evidence of a naturally spoken language. The modern area of academic practice known as language documentation has its roots in …

On Rights Management in Anthropological and Linguistic Sound Collections

Archivists and curators benefit from well-documented rights declarations and agreements in the provenance of artifacts. Linguists, folklorists, anthropologists, and increasingly computer scientists, during the course of their work may create large …

Media Rights for Organizations

This whitepaper is a simple introduction to legal concerns organizations which produce media should address. It addresses copyright, and creative commons licenses.

Where Have All the Collections Gone?

The Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) aggregator currently compiles 443,217 records from 65 providers. Participating archives each provide Dublin Core metadata via an OAI feed.Based on the needs of both linguists and language community members, …

Language Archive Records: Interoperability of Referencing Practices and Metadata Models

With the rise of the digital language archive and the plethora of referenceable content, a critical question arises: “How easy is it for authors to use existing tools to cite the content they are referencing?” This is especially important as people …

From Archive to Citation

I present an overview of the kinds of challenges that authors have when they try to import metadata from archives into Zotero, where they will later use the data to craft references and citations.

Open Source Code Serving Endangered Languages

We present a database of open source code that can be used by low-resource language communities and developers to build digital resources. Our database is also useful to software developers working with those communities and to researchers looking to …

Lexical Dataset Archiving: An Assessment of Practice

Bird and Simons (2003), Johnson (2004), Nathan (2011), and Holton (2012) all emphasize the importance of archiving language artifacts. Woodbury (2003) suggests that lexical database resources should become part of the preserved documentary evidence - …

Challenges of Implementing a Tool to Extract Metadata from Linguists: The Use Case of RAMP

In January 2011, SIL Internationalʼs archive launched a corporate instance of DSpace as part of a larger and ongoing effort to digitally archive language data and resources. Along with that instance of DSpace, it also launched a software application …

Photo Digitization

SIL Americas Area project to digitize photos documenting the people and the work of SIL in the Americas.