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Posted on 24 August, 2012 by Peter Austin

The last six months has been a very busy time at ELAR, and since March we have greatly expanded the number of deposits available online and seen a big leap in the number of registered users and depositors (for earlier reports on progress see my posts over at the ELAC blog for March, April and June).

We have been able to increase the number of online collections for various reasons. These include employing additional staff, particularly Dr Kakia Chatsiou as Digital Content Curator (formerly of the Data Archive at Essex University, and recent London 2012 Olympics participant), and six student archive assistants drawn from the pool of well-trained SOAS language documentation MA and PhD students. A further reason is that we adopted what we term a Progressive Depositing Model (PDM) which divides archival curation into two parts, separating what we call a “data conditioning” stage (dealing with such things as correct and consistent file and folder naming) to allow for more rapid deposit file uploading (and hence making materials available for immediate use but in a somewhat “raw” presentational form) from (later) metadata curation where the files are bundled and depositor’s metadata is linked to the files and bundles, giving a richer and more easily accessible presentation. Over time deposits can progressively change their status as they are worked on by the ELAR team.

PDM has another “progressive” aspect which is that we are encouraging all depositers, especially ELDP grantees, even more strongly than we did previously to, in a variation of William Porcher Miles’ aphorism, “deposit early and deposit often”. So, for example, soon after carrying out fieldwork, depositors should send in their media and working analysis files and associated metadata, even if transcriptions, translations and analytical annotations are incomplete. They can then progressively add data, analysis and metadata files as they continue to work on their project. In future, depositors will be able to upload and manage their deposits and metadata through an online system that we are currently building. The system will deal with updates and versioning as depositors add new materials and enrich and replace existing files. More on this later.

So where do we stand now? As at yesterday we have 101 deposits online totalling 95,375 files and 5.15 terabytes of data and analysis (five times what we had available five months ago, and 25% up on June). These are distributed geographically as follows:

Africa	18
Asia	22
Australia	16
Europe	10
Middle East	3
North America	14
Pacific	8
South America	11

Another 22 deposits have been received and are currently being curated (see this map for their locations).

Perhaps because we have been increasing the amount of available material relatively rapidly and reached a “critical mass” of deposits, the number of registered users has been growing recently by 2-3 per day and now stands at 651. This is an increase of 44% on March 2012. Interestingly, users have been making increasing numbers of subscription requests to be allowed by depositors to access files that are categorised as S in the ELAR catalogue access and usage protocol system. So far 49 such requests have been approved and a further 61 are pending.

Stay tuned for further updates — I will attempt to summarise the trends we are seeing roughly once every two months.

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← ELAR depositor Kris Stenzel on Kotiria and the Wa’ikhana Languages of Brazil

Language documentation’s grey literature →