OLAC revamp
In 2025/2026 the DELAMAN OLAC subcommittee is working on redeveloping the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) metadata harvester. The first part of this work has been to stabilise the existing systems and to work though them to ensure they use current security settings. The existing OAI-PMH feed from participating archives will continue to be accpeted, and we hope to include new features in future, including adding glottolog and Austlang codes.
An outline of planned activity is below:
Phase 1 — Harvesting and Infrastructure
Harvest past OLAC member archives
Ensure inclusion of all active repositories and identify defunct ones for outreach or archival handling.
Phase 2 — Enrich, Search and Presentation
Enrich metadata: Language codes
Add Austlang, Glottolog, mapped via ISO 639 language codes to index.
Austlang and Glottolog in UI
Display both codes and labels; enable search and filtering by language code.
OLAC v2 Search UI
Build new interfaces for search, item detail, and language views.
Preserve trace to v1 metadata
Provide continuity by linking to archived v1 records for entries missing in v2.
Phase 3 — Data and Quality
Calculate metadata quality score
Compute and store quality metrics per record for display and monitoring.
Linkchecker
Implement automated link validation to flag or suppress non-resolving URLs.
Outlinks management
Distinguish between resource links and authority links (Glottolog, Ethnologue, etc.); prefer DOI or Handle.
Phase 4 — Community and Operations
Invite institutions to (re-)join OLAC
Contact repositories once the new system stabilizes to expand participation.
Reports via e-mail
Enable outbound email for reports (e.g. monthly metadata quality summaries).
Aggregator functionality
Recreate a unified OLAC v2 aggregator service combining all participating archives into a single access point.
Thanks to Thomase Krämer for his work on this. Funding has come from the Australian Reseach Council, the Endangered Languages Archive, and the Language Data Commons of Australia.