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OLAC News from 2003 |
OLAC Repositories standard adopted: [9/03]The OLAC Repositories standard has been promoted to `adopted' status by the OLAC Council following a 9 month period of experimentation by OLAC implementers. This document defines the standards OLAC archives must follow in implementing a metadata repository. Originally called the OLAC Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, this document was first drafted in December 2001. A year later it was broadened to cover the new static repository model and given a more general title. Since then there have been two further revisions in response to consultation with the community. After a further round of revision in consultation with the OLAC Council, the document is now adopted as the second OLAC standard.
OLAC Council appointed: [8/03]The OLAC Council has now been ratified by the Advisory Board. The council members are: Anthony Aristar (LINGUIST), Chris Cieri (LDC), Gary Holton (ANLC), Chu-Ren Huang (Academia Sinica), Heidi Johnson (AILLA), Laurent Romary (ATILF), Joan Spanne (SIL) and Martin Wynne (OTA). These people have experiential knowledge of OLAC and will make decisions about OLAC standards, best practices and repositories as described in the document process and registration process.
OLAC Process document adopted: [7/03]The OLAC Process document has been promoted to `adopted' status by the OLAC Advisory Board. The process document summarizes the governing ideas of OLAC and describes how OLAC is organized and how it operates, including the document process and working group process. First drafted in May 2001, the document has been revised in consultation with the community over the past two years, as it has progressed through `draft', `proposed', and `candidate' status. After one more round of revision in consultation with the Advisory Board, the document is now adopted as the first OLAC standard.
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OLAC Working Group on Outreach: Call for Participation [6/03]The OLAC Working Group on Outreach will raise awareness of the activities and resources of OLAC by facilating the production of general-audience documents describing various aspects of OLAC and by contacting individuals and organizations who manage archives but are not yet part of OLAC. New OLAC infrastructure [5/03]New OLAC infrastructure is now in place, including a new database schema for the OLAC 1.0 metadata format, a static repository gateway based on the new OAI standard, fully updated repository validation and registration software, and a new open source OLAC software suite released on sourceforge, including harvester and aggregator and an OLAC-DC crosswalk. This infrastructure was developed by Haejoong Lee, Gary Simons and Steven Bird with sponsorship from the US National Science Foundation.
OLAC in BBC News [3/03]On March 20, 2003, BBC News published an article called Digital race to save languages, which talks about the language archives community "fighting against time to save decades of data on the world's endangered languages from ending on the digital scrap heap." The article is based on interviews with Steven Bird and Peter Austin.
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