OLAC: The Open Language Archives Community

Steven Bird                    Gary Simons
University of Pennsylvania     SIL International

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 [www.language-archives.org].

The work builds on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI).  The OAI was
launched in October 1999 to provide a common framework across electronic
preprint archives [www.openarchives.org], and it has since been broadened
to include digital repositories of scholarly materials regardless of their
type.

We will demonstrate the OLAC data providers, the OLAC virtual data
provider, and the OLAC mini-repository system.  We will also demonstrate
the OLAC search interface, which provides one-step access to the catalogs
of a dozen archives in five countries (Germany, Netherlands, France, UK,
USA), having a combined total of some 18,000 records.  Production versions
of these prototypes will be incorporated into the LINGUIST website
[www.linguistlist.org].