OLAC receives new NSF Sponsorship: [8/07]

The US National Science Foundation has funded a project OLAC: Accessing the World's Language Resources which aims to greatly improve access to language resources for linguists and the broader communities of interest, by achieving an order-of-magnitude increase in the coverage of the OLAC catalog and in the use of OLAC search services. The project will do so through two main areas of activity: developing guidelines and services that encourage language archives to follow best common practices that will facilitate language resource discovery through OLAC, and developing services to bridge from the resource catalogs of the library and web domains to the OLAC catalog.

OLAC Search Engine Handles 2000 Queries Per Day: [4/06]

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.

EMELD Workshop on Digital Language Documentation: [3/06]

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 July, in conjunction with the LSA Summer Meeting at Michigan State University.

OLAC Tutorial at the LSA Annual Meeting [1/06]

A tutorial on OLAC 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.

EMELD Workshop on Digital Language Documentation: [4/05]

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 will be held in July, in conjunction with the LSA Institute at MIT.

LSA Tutorial on Archiving and Linguistic Resources: [1/05]

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.

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