Presentations

Abstract

In the beginning of 2018, The Language Archive migrated its repository from an in-house built solution to a solution that is largely based on Islandora. We will talk about the migration trajectory and will present the new setup, which includes a custom ingest front- and back-end

Abstract

In many areas of the world, language archives are being created, containing information on endangered languages, adhering to sophisticated metadata schemes and archiving standards. The data deposited in these archives, however, is as of yet hard to access, especially for community members who might be easily frustrated when trying to access data. In the DoBeS archive, there are various ways of searching and browsing through the deposited data, allowing for sophisticated queries targeting information in the metadata or annotations, so that expert users can work with the language documentations. However, this user-interface is too complex for a visitor that has not been thoroughly introduced to the structures and it is difficult to find results that may satisfy typical community members’ interests. As a shortcut for users from the community, a community portal has been created which displays an array of traditionally relevant topics in a simple and attractive way and links to resources in the archive. Topics include traditional and personal stories, procedurals and traditional activities. It is suitable for school use and due to its topical structure, may also serve as a base for developing teaching materials. In the community portal, a number of pre-defined searches have been set up for certain resource categories. These categories are marked in the metadata, so whenever a metadata file is uploaded into the archive containing one of these values, it will automatically become part of the search results in the portal. The query to the metadata database is made possible through a so-called REST interface. Via this protocol, the metadata search can be accessed as a web service within any other dynamic web content management framework. This search technology could also be used to implement a portal for a broader audience, introducing the archive from various angles to different potential user groups. Here too, the dynamic searches guarantee a low maintenance effort once the portal has been created. And finally, we will show additional ways to represent archived data (e. g. using Google Earth layers), in order to draw a comprehensive picture of the various ways to enter the DoBeS archive and efficiently access relevant information. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to bridging the gap between the creation of comprehensive language documentation and community efforts at revitalization, and help researchers to fulfill their ethical commitment to make data as accessible as possible.

Abstract

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.org

Abstract

Technological innovation is continuously creating new encoding formats for video. The introduction of HDTV, the wish to move towards 3D video etc will increase the required bandwidths and capacities by factors. New coding standards such as H.264 and JPEG2000 have been developed to overcome the problem of increasing bit rates and new codecs such as H.265 are in the pipeline. In addition we have seen in the recent decades that the maintenance of old formats is not guaranteed if their markets become too small.
This extreme innovation rate is problematic for all archiving intentions, since archiving means guaranteeing continuous accessibility of the archived digital resources. It is known that a continuous migration will be required to interpret stored video streams. At the bit-stream level migration to new storage technology can be organized by fully automatic procedures. At the encoding level problems are much more severe. When migrating compressed video for example we will be confronted with concatenation effects creating serious artifacts. Ideally we would like to store uncompressed or lossless compressed video so that we have a master copy from which we can generate the various presentation formats. Currently, frequently MPEG2 is used for this purpose although it does not prevent information degradation due to concatenation. We will argue for a move to lossless JPEG-2000 encoding as master format and proper process metadata description. Yet we have to solve the dilemma that field workers will deliver highly compressed formats due to the usage of consumer equipment also in future.