Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages PROTOTYPE available for viewing here http://laal.cdu.edu.au/
The Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages is a digital archive of endangered literature in Australian Indigenous languages from bilingual schools in the Northern Territory.
The Australian Research Council has provided funding for this collaboration between Charles Darwin University, the Australian National University and the Northern Territory Department of Education and Children’s Services.
The demise of bilingual education in Australian languages in the Northern Territory has led to the endangerment of thousands of language resources developed for these programs in remote schools. In an effort to preserve such rich cultural and linguistic heritage, the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages project aims to establish an open access online repository comprising digital versions of these materials. Using web technologies to store and access the resources will make them available to the communities of origin, the wider academic community, and the general public.
So far, over 1000 items have been digitised, OCRed (optical character recognition – to make the text searchable), had their metadata checked and been uploaded to a holding area awaiting permission to be published. Another approximately 1500 items have been digitised are in the process of being OCRed, checked and uploaded, and several hundred more are still awaiting digitisation. The archive will eventually include thousands of items in over 25 Australian languages.
The testing phase is now underway, with a small selection of items from across the different communities and languages. This will give the team a chance to identify any issues with the interface before doing a public launch later in 2013 with many more items. Your feedback is encouraged.
The project team has visited around 18 communities to identify and collect materials, and to discuss the project with community members and seek permission to upload works by the various authors, illustrators and other contributors. As this archive will be completely open to anyone, only those items for which such permission has been granted will be made available here. If you can help us find more of the creators of these items (or family members for those who have passed away), please contact us.
The goal has always been to create a living archive, with connections to the people and communities where the books were created. This will allow for collaborative research work with the indigenous authorities and communities.
Stories and pictures in this archive belong to the Aboriginal language owners, creators of the materials and their descendants. The contents are to be used only for study and research, and not for any commercial interests.
For further information, please contact livingarchive@cdu.edu.au
