Regional archives and community portals

During the past 10 years, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics has developed an extensive technological framework around its digital archive for linguistic resources. About two years ago the MPI started installing archives based on this "Language Archiving Technology” (LAT) framework in various locations around the world. The idea behind this initiative is to have regional archives in the proximity of the area where the linguistic resources are collected. This will facilitate access to the resources and create more local involvement and awareness towards the preservation of endangered languages and cultures. The user interfaces of some of the LAT tools are not always very suitable for the speech community due to the language that is being used (English) and the extensive set of features of these tools, many of which are of less interest to the speech community. Therefore a framework was developed that allows the integration of archived content within a web portal that is managed using a standard Content Management System (Plone). A web service was developed that enables searching of the archive’s metadata database using the SOAP protocol. From within the CMS, the content editor can easily specify queries for specific metadata values, e.g. all songs in a particular language. These queries can be linked to buttons or images in the portal. The search results are then parsed into nicely formatted lists of resources. The facility will make the use of the local archive more efficient and user friendly. www.lat-mpi.eu www.mpi.nl/dobes www.plone.or