14 Jan 2004

Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)
Distributed, Australia
Supplied note: "PARADISEC is a cross-institutional collaborative project for digital archiving and access to Australian researchers’ field recordings of endangered languages and musics of the Asia-Pacific region. It is hosted by the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University. - nt."
Self-description; "Australia lies within a region of great linguistic and cultural diversity. Over 2000 of the world's 6000 different languages are spoken in Australia, the South Pacific Islands (including around 900 languages in New Guinea alone) and Southeast Asia. Within the next century this number is likely to drop to a few hundred. The majority of these 2000 languages and their associated cultural expressions such as music are very poorly documented. Even in those languages that have begun to be documented many of the most developed cultural expressions (such as the dense and highly allusive language used in song) have never been studied.
PARADISEC (Pacific And Regional Archive for DIgital Sources in Endangered Cultures) offers a facility for digital conservation and access for endangered materials from the Pacific region, defined broadly to include Oceania and East and Southeast Asia. At present no such facility exists, and our research group is examining feasible models to ensure that the archive can provide access to interested communities, and conforms with emerging international standards for digital archiving.
In 2003 we aim to establish a framework for accessioning, cataloguing, and digitising audio, text and visual material, and preserving digital copies. The primary focus of this initial stage is safe preservation of material that would otherwise be lost, especially field tapes from the 1950s and 1960s."
Site contents: Data & Equipment (Data Preservation, Information discovery, Intellectual property issues, Cultural renewal, Technicalities, Recording Equipment); Services (Digitisation of audio and material, CD production. Training in the documentation techniques of recording, data management, and data linkage. Safe backup of digital data); Events; Future Directions; Deposit/Access; Profile; Links (Digitisation and Digital links, Pacific Languages and Resources, Digital Image and Video Collections, Endangered music and languages, Archives and Archiving, Linguistics Software, Annotation, Dictionaries, Metadata, Audio Preservation, Restoration and Access to Recordings, Digitisation and Audio Equipment, Software); Contact; Downloads (the PARADISEC access form, the PARADISEC deposit form, an information form for Depositors, the PARADISEC metadata set, PARADISEC information leaflet, the PARADISEC PowerPoint Presentation, Dr Linda Barwick's paper on PARADISEC from the 2003 OZeCulture Conference, PARADISEC's public profile document).
URL http://paradisec.org.au
Internet Archive http://web.archive.org/web/*/paradisec.org.au
Link reported by: Nick Thieberger (nt@paradisec.org.au)
* Resource type [news - documents - study - corporate info. - online guide]: Corporate Info./Documents/Online Guide
* Publisher [academic - business - govt. - library/museum - NGO - other]: Academic
* Scholarly usefulness [essential - v.useful - useful - interesting - marginal]: Essential
* External links to the resource [over 3,000 - under 3,000 - under 1,000 - under 300 - under 100 - under 30]: under 30