PARADISEC
PARADISEC (the Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) offers a facility for digital conservation and access to endangered materials from all over the world. Its research group has developed models to ensure that the archive can provide access to interested communities, and conforms with international standards for digital archiving. It has established 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. Current fieldwork outputs are increasingly being added to the collection and include media recordings, transcripts, fieldnotes and other materials. It currently stores 145,000 files totaling about 23 terabytes.
A primary motivation for the project is making field recordings available to those recorded and their descendants. PARADISEC has sent copies of recordings to the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, the University of New Caledonia, the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, the Solomon Islands Museum and to Rapa Nui.
PARADISEC is a consortium of three universities: the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne, and the Australian National University.