The Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project at the School of
Oriental and African Studies, London, and some global and local issues in
archiving ethnographic sound material from Australia's geographic region
Peter Austin (SOAS)
The Hans Rausing Endangered
Languages Project (HRELP) was established in mid-2002 at the
1. an Endangered Languages Academic Programme
(ELAP) which is responsible for research and training a new generation of
scholars to work on endangered languages through its new MA in Language
Documentation and Description and PhD in Field Linguistics, along with training
courses on language documentation;
2. an Endangered
Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) which provides grants to support
research projects on endangered languages;
3. an Endangered
Languages Archive (ELAR) which will be a digital archive of materials and
meta-data collected by researchers associated with ELAP and ELAR. This will
include both raw field data in the form of digital video and audio recordings,
along with related metadata, plus processed materials such as computer files of
transcripts and write-ups of the data. In addition, ELAR will accept donations
of digital materials on endangered languages from SOAS and other sources. These
latter materials are quite extensive and include field materials collected from
the 1920s onwards by researchers associated with SOAS, mostly on Asian and
African languages, but including materials from the Australia-Pacific region.
It is expected that ELAR will be part of the Digital Endangered Languages
Archive Network (DELAN) and work closely with partner organisations, including
the Oxford Text Archive. A searchable metadata catalogue to the collection is
planned.
In this paper I present an overview of the structure of
ELAR and a progress report on work done to date in establishing the digital
archive and active partnerships, including a catalogue of the materials
assembled so far from the Australia and Pacific region.