Open Language Archives Community

What is the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC)?

The Open Language Archives Community, or OLAC, has been operating since 2001. It serves to aggregate information from participating digital language archives and present it in a structured format creating a worldwide virtual library of language resources by: (i) developing consensus on best current practice for the digital archiving of language resources, and (ii) developing a network of interoperating repositories and services for housing and accessing such resources. A second edition of OLAC was launched in September 2026 by the Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archives Network (DELAMAN).

History of OLAC

OLAC was founded at the Workshop on Web-Based Language Documentation and Description, held in Philadelphia in December 2000. The initial work was led by Gary Simons and Steven Bird and was funded by the Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data (EMELD) project. Work on the metadata terms was carried out by them and Helen Aristar-Dry, Heidi Johnson, Alexandre Nakhimovsky, Jeff Good. One hundred participants, representing language resource projects in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia, reviewed the founding documents and reached general consensus supporting the foundation of OLAC. To see more details on OLAC’s history see the OLAC pages in the Internet Archive.

In the early 2020s Bird & Simons approached DELAMAN to take on reviving the OLAC infrastructure (Bird & Simons 2021: 2). A subcommittee of DELAMAN then arranged funding and took on the development of OLAC. The members are Sylvain Loiseau, Alexis Michaud, Felix Rau, Mandana Seyfeddinipur, Nick Thieberger, and Paul Trilsbeek. Thomas Krämer has been leading the coding, with funding provided by the Australian Research Council, the Endangered Languages Archive, and the Language Data Commons of Australia.

The committee can be contacted at olac-committee@uni-koeln.de.

Founding Documents

These documents were presented at the international workshop in December 2000 where OLAC was established.

• The Seven Pillars of Open Language Archiving: A Vision Statement
• Requirements on the Infrastructure for Open Language Archiving
• White Paper on Establishing an Infrastructure for Open Language Archiving

Overview

The OLAC Overview presents the background and vision of OLAC, as presented at the inaugural meeting which took place in Philadelphia in December 2000. It describes the language resources community, the Dublin Core metadata set and the Open Archives Initiative.

Papers

• Bird, S. & Simons, G. (2021). Towards an Agenda for Open Language Archiving. University of North Texas.
• Hughes, B. & Kamat, A. (2005). A Metadata Search Engine for Digital Language Archives
• Hughes, B. (2004). Metadata Quality Evaluation: Experience from the Open Language Archives Community
• Simons, G. & Bird, S. (2003). The Open Language Archives Community: An infrastructure for distributed archiving of language resources
• Bird, S. & Simons, G. (2003). Building an Open Language Archives Community on the DC Foundation
• Simons, G. & Bird, S. (2003). Building an Open Language Archives Community on the OAI Foundation
• Bird, S. & Simons, G. (2003). Seven Dimensions of Portability for Language Documentation and Description
• Bird, S. & Simons, G. (2003). Extending Dublin Core Metadata to support the description and discovery of language resources
• Simons, G. & Bird, S. (2003). The Open Language Archives Community: An Infrastructure for Distributed Archiving of Language Resources
• Bird, S.; Simons, G.; & Huang, C.-R. (2001). The Open Language Archives Community and Asian Language Resources
• Bird, S. & Simons, G. (2001). The OLAC Metadata Set and Controlled Vocabularies