International Expert Meeting on

Access Management for Distributed Language Archives

Peter Wittenburg

Background

Some of the major archives storing endangered languages and music material recently formed a semi-official network, which is called DELAMAN (Digital Endangered Languages and Music Archives Network - for more information see www.delaman.org). Two of the major goals of DELAMAN are the massive distribution of data to increase the chances of their long-term endurance and the intention to create one archive space that users can seamlessly navigate in. These ideas were presented also at LREC (Language Resources and Evaluation Conference) and GGF (Global GRID Forum) this year. It is obvious that DELAMAN is one of the first initiatives, at least in the realm of the humanities, where these ideas have been formulated. This is motivated by (1) the nature of the data being recordings of cultural heritage which will soon become extinct and (2) the worldwide relevance of the data and distribution to the interested people. Further, it appears that the EU[1] would like to fund a project in Europe to implement ideas as they are formulated by DELAMAN.

As can be seen at the DELAMAN web site there are a number of non-technical issues that must be solved if we want to integrate archives in the sense as mentioned above. It is evident that access management issues are crucial since we must consider critical ethical and legal issues.

Goal

Therefore, purpose of the November workshop is as follows:

• We want to discuss the expectations of the researchers in order to better understand possible usage scenarios and the legal and ethical requirements. One of the issues is the accessibility of the data in the archives by the indigenous communities.
• We want to discuss the archivists’ requirements since we have to start working on the integration work from existing archives and existing archive infrastructures.
• We want to understand in detail what has already been done on the technological side in early integration initiatives such as ISLE and in communities such as the Global GRID.

The results of the workshop should help us to find appropriate solutions to achieve the intended goals of distributing data amongst archives and establishing an integrated access service for the DELAMAN archives.

Persons

To achieve these goals the workshop will have participants from the relevant areas:

• Field Researchers who are very familiar with the fieldwork situation and the wishes of the researcher and native speaker communities.
• Archivists who are creating and running the endangered languages and music archives and who have deep knowledge about the setup of their archives and their commitments.
• Computer Scientists who are actively involved in middleware such as the Handle System, the Shibboleth System, the GlobalGRID middleware, distributed file systems and others.

It seems certain that experts for all topics mentioned will participate.

Programme

The workshop will span two days. After an introduction to the topic, the first morning will be devoted to discussing the requirements and wishes from the researchers perspective. The first afternoon will be devoted to discussing concrete archiving infrastructures to understand the differences, the intentions and the commitments. The second morning will be devoted to discussing the technological trends, the architectures and implementations of existing and emerging solutions and their future potential. The second afternoon will be devoted to discussing all issues that remain open and to summarizing the discussions so far. The result should be to draw conclusions that can be the basis for making decisions.

Place:              Max-Planck-Institute, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Date:                29/30.11.2004