OLAC - Open Language Archives Community - www.language-archives.org
Steven Bird & Gary Simons

Linguists and language technologists depend on a vast array of
language resources, including texts, recordings, lexicons,
annotations, software, protocols, models, and formats. As resources
proliferate we need a systematic way to find them.

OLAC, the Open Language Archives Community, is an international
partnership of institutions and individuals who are 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.

OLAC builds on the Open Archives Initiative and the Dublin Core
Metadata Initiative, and is sponsored by the NSF/EC project
"International Standards in Language Engineering" (ISLE).

The OLAC homepage, at www.language-archives.org, hosts many documents
providing full technical details of OLAC, including the OLAC Metadata
Set, the Metadata Schema, the OLAC Process document, information for
implementers, and the OLAC-General Mailing list. 

** OLAC seeks the participation of the computational linguistics
** community in helping to define controlled vocabularies for language
** resources.

Coordinators: Steven Bird (UPenn) & Gary Simons (SIL International)

Advisory Board: Helen Aristar Dry (LINGUIST), Susan Hockey (UCL),
Chu-Ren Huang (Academia Sinica), Mark Liberman (UPenn), Brian
MacWhinney (CMU), Michael Nelson (NASA), Nicholas Ostler (FEL), Henry
Thompson (Edinburgh), Hans Uszkoreit (DFKI), Antonio Zampolli (ILC). 

Participating Archives and Services: LDC, ELRA, DFKI (ACL-NLSR),
LACITO, SIL, Alaska Native Language Center, Comparative Bantu Online
Dictionary, Perseus Project, American Philosophical Society, Utrecht
Typological Research Centre.

Intending Participants: Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive,
American Indian Studies Research Institute, Institut National de la
Langue Française, Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry,
LINGUIST List, Max Planck Institute, Smithsonian National
Anthropological Archives, Oxford Text Archive, Rosetta Project,
Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library.