PARADISEC Activity Update

PARADISEC is steaming in to 2017, with plenty of activity across our offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra.

It’s been a huge year of increasing our quantity of archived material, growing 79% in 13 months since April 2016 from 14TB to 25TB, in part due to the contribution of the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. The collection now represents 1,085 languages in nearly 153,000 files. This could be an interesting challenge we will face in the coming years – the continued growth in our requirement for digital storage space. This 11TB represents an increase to 7,150 hours of audio recordings (growth of 125% since April 2016!), with 40 new collections and nearly 2200 new items.

In February we received a contribution from the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages to help cover costs of archiving Gregory Anderson’s new collection (GA1) of Gta’ language documentation (central India).

We were delighted, in March, to be given a large collection of wonderful videos of Balinese and Indonesian culture, made by the late Made Wijaya (Michael White). Metadata has been processed and added, video files are in preparation.

April saw RN2 added: Documentation of Enga (PNG highlands) collected during Melbourne University’s Linguistic Field Methods class of 2009 taught by Rachel Nordlinger.

Our large project to improve the metadata of our Papua New Guinea collections, running since August last year, and made possible in part with funding from the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), will be drawing to a close at the end of May. This has been a great success with the metadata for these 107 PNG collections being enriched through a variety of methods and means, as well as several useful catalog improvements being implemented as part of this project.

One of the PNG collections being added now is Susan Holzknecht’s 160 cassettes of oral tradition in 15 Markham languages, stored at the Menzies Library until now.

Also launched in August 2016 was the new PARADISEC wordpress website, which has been running well and is a welcome update to PARADISEC’s web presence and image.

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