PARADISEC activity update

It’s been a busy start to 2016 for PARADISEC. Nick Thieberger published an article about the race to preserve Pacific Language Records in The Conversation. New collections archived this year in PARADISEC include Danielle Barth’s Matukar Panau documentation from Papua New Guinea, Alan Walker’s Sabu materials from Indonesia, Lila San Roque’s Mnanki, Arso and Duna collections from Papua New Guinea and a large collection (RB5) from Roger Blench, containing a range of materials from Nigeria and Cameroon.

In the first few months of 2016, we have been working on enhancing the metadata of all of PARADISEC’s Vanuatu collections as part of a project funded by the Max Planck Society. We have added language, date and location information to the collections of Lamont Lindstrom, Arthur Capell and Terence Crowley and included a new collection from Aviva Shimelman of Malekulan language materials, as well as digitizing tapes for the Vanuatu Cultural Centre.

We have also been focusing on future proofing the PARADISEC collection by resampling any parts of the collection recorded at unusual sample rates.

Currently, 915 languages and 67 countries are represented in the collection. The archive contains 358 collections, 13,822 items and 113,289 files. This represents 5,800 hours and 13.1 TB of files.