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OLAC News from 2004 |
OLAC at the LSA: [10/04]OLAC will be organizing a booth in the publisher's exhibit hall at the Linguistic Society of America meeting in San Francisco in January. OLAC search services will be demonstrated, and OLAC archives are invited to send someone to help staff the booth, to give live demonstrations of their web interfaces and to hand out flyers for their projects. The booth and web access are expensive and we welcome any offers of sponsorship. If you would like to be involved, please contact Heidi Johnson.
LDC Hosts OLAC Search Interface: [7/04]The Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania now hosts a powerful OLAC search interface. Features include result summaries by archive, result ranking, approximate language name matching, and country-based searches. (The service was developed by Amol Kamat, Baden Hughes, and Steven Bird at the University of Melbourne, with sponsorship from the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering and the Linguistic Data Consortium.)
Archive Report Cards: [7/04]The archive report cards, added to the OLAC site in March, give summary statistics for each repository and an assessment of the quality of the repository's metadata. The assessment is based on OLAC and Dublin Core guidelines. An updated version of the system is now available, including a revised evaluation algorithm to account for changes in DC recommendations, and revised labelling of the reports for consistency with OLAC terminology. The evaluation metric rewards the use of OLAC extensions (controlled vocabularies), and what we consider to be the most important DC elements: title, date, subject, description, and identifier. The report cards can be accessed by clicking the "REPORT CARD" links on the OLAC Archives page. (The service was developed by Amol Kamat, Baden Hughes, and Steven Bird at the University of Melbourne, with sponsorship from the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, and the Linguistic Data Consortium.)
OLAC Metadata standard adopted: [3/04]The OLAC Metadata standard has been promoted to `adopted' status by the OLAC Council following a 12 month period of experimentation by OLAC implementers. This document defines the format used for the interchange of metadata within the framework of the Open Archives Initiative. The metadata set is based on Qualified Dublin Core, but the format allows for the use of extensions to express community-specific qualifiers.
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OLAC Archive on board European Space Agency mission [3/04]On March 2, the Rosetta Disk left Earth on board an Ariane-5 rocket from the European Spaceport in Kourou, French Guyana. The mission's target is the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which will be reached in 2014 after a "billiard ball" journey through the Solar System lasting more than ten years. The Rosetta Disk is a modern version of the Rosetta Stone. The 2-inch nickel disk is micro-etched with 30,000 pages of information covering over 1,000 languages. For each language there is a simple dictionary, a guide to pronunciation and counting, and a traditional story with translation. Additionally, to help language decipherment in remote futures, a translation of a common text (the first three chapters of the book of Genesis) is provided in all languages. The disk can be read with the aid of an optical microscope. The materials on the disk come from the Rosetta 1000 Language Archive, an OLAC repository.
OLAC identified as "exemplary" in DLF report: [1/04]In a recent Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services, published by the Digital Library Federation, Martha Brogan praised the Open Language Archives Community as exemplary. She concluded her discussion with the following statement: OLAC is exemplary in several ways: the technical and social infrastructure that it has developed to support its community of contributors, based on shared principles and standards; the resources that it provides at its Web site about its purpose, scope, history, tools, news and events; and the efforts of its two leaders -- Gary Simons and Steven Bird [2003a, 2003b, 2003c] -- to articulate the challenges, analyze the options, and recommend possible solutions to their community of contributors in order to improve OLAC. With the formal appointment of an Outreach Working Group and its other efforts to accommodate small archives that lack technical support, OLAC's content and influence is likely to grow.
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