Newsletter #3
August 2012
USER INTERFACE
We are pleased to announce that, following some excellent responses to the appeal for ‘Expressions of Interest’, we have engaged
Steven McPhillips, an IT consultant from Canberra, to develop the user interface to the Living Archive. We look forward to working with Steven, who was previously involved in developing the catalogue for the National Library of Australia, and the website for ANU ePress. We appreciated the assistance given by
Anthony Hornby and Helen Rysavy in making this appointment. We have also engaged
Trevor van Weeren from Merri Creek productions to design the interface (see
http://merricreek.com/). As design ideas develop, we will be testing them, and making options available on the LAAL website for feedback.
SITE VISITS
The project manager, Cathy Bow, recently visited
Shepherdson College, Galiwin’ku with Melanie Wilkinson from DET. They found hundreds of resources in
Djambarrpuyŋu and other Yolŋu languages and brought many back to Darwin for scanning.
Noela Hall from the school was particularly helpful, and
Helen Nuŋgalurr is continuing to scan more materials and collect signatures as they tell people in the community about the project and get their permission to put their own work or that of their relatives available to the public on the internet.
Cathy and Melanie also visited
Groote Eylandt, spending time in the Linguistics office identifying resources in
Andilyakwa produced in the brief period of bilingual education there in the 1970s. They visited the schools at
Angurugu and
Umbakumba, and spent time talking with people who had been involved with the bilingual program and came home with over 100 books for the archive. They were particularly delighted to find some materials at Umbakumba, having previously heard that all language materials had been destroyed or lost.
This week's visit to
Yirrkala School was a great opportunity to see a Literature Production Centre still functioning and supporting language education in the classroom.We found
Gumatj language materials dating back over 35 years, plus newer resources in
Dhuwaya and other clan languages.
Further visits this term are planned for
Milingimbi, Maningrida and
Wadeye, and later in the year to
Numbulwar and
Gunbalanya.
DIGITISATION AND OCR
We’ve been refining the process of optical character recognition as we digitise materials using
Abbyy Fine Reader, but the software doesn’t always cope well with the variety of inputs, in both quality and content. We’re also talking with a digitisation expert from New Zealand,
Andrew Pettengell, and seeking his input on getting an efficient and effective workflow happening. Meanwhile we seem to have a small cottage industry of workers doing scanning, OCRing and updating spreadsheets of metadata, including
Nicola Treadwell in the CDU library,
Amy Graham working from home in Adelaide, and
Danyelle Kelly and
Hina Siddiqui in the LAAL office.
THE ARCHIVE FRAMEWORK
The eSpace repository at CDU Library has been modified to make it compatible with
OLAC metadata standards (including codes for some Aboriginal languages which we will negotiate with the ISO), and a small selection of materials is being uploaded as a trial. There are still some wrinkles to iron out, but once the site is ready we will begin uploading materials each month while continuing to locate and scan more books and get permissions from authors and illustrators.
SIDE PROJECTS
In June Michael and Cathy met with representatives from
Apple to discuss ideas for assisting work among indigenous people in rural and remote communities. They proposed an
update to the iOS keyboard to allow for typing special characters in Australian languages.
PRESENTATIONS
In July, chief investigator
Brian Devlin addressed a meeting of the
National and State Libraries Australia. Delegates took a keen interest in the project, and had suggestions for working with libraries around the country. We are working to find a way of sharing with them the metadata we are developing for the collection. It is based on metadata downloaded from Libraries Australia, but we are in the process of making many corrections and enrichments.
ONLINE
The Living Archive now has a
Twitter account, posting occasional updates about the project. Follow us at <
http://twitter.com/living_archive> or just @living_archive.