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Making Pacific Language Materials Discoverable: Outcomes

Items edited

As of June 2018, there are 9,055 items in UHM Library Voyager catalog that have been edited and enhanced by this project.

2017 Poster presentation at the International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (Berez-Kroeker, Kleiber and Yarbrough)

This was the 5th ICLDC and it had the theme Vital Voices: Linking Language and Wellbeing. It was held at the Hawai‘i Imin Center on the campus of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa from the 2-5th of March.

This poster was presented on Saturday the 4th of March. The response was positive. Linguists are familiar with the importance of metadata, but aren't too familiar with the particular issues specific to library metadata.

2016 Presentation at the University of North Texas (Berez-Kroeker)

2016 Presentation at the Pacific History Association Conference (Kleiber)

2016 Presentation at the American Library Association Midwinter Conference (Chopey)

2015 Presentation at Oceania Ensemble Colloquium (Kleiber)

2015 Presentation the Pacific Islands Association of Libraries, Archives and Museums Conference (Kleiber)

Crosswalk between Voyager and OLAC

Building on the work of Christopher Hirt, Gary Simons and Joan Spanne (see document linked below), and working with Daniel Ishimitsu from the UHM Library's Desktop Networking Service department, we successfully created a crosswalk between UHM's enhanced MARC records and OLAC’s (Open Language Archives Community) Dublin-Core-based records. The outcome is that OLAC can now harvest the data and the enhanced UHM records are now visible in this aggregated language database.

Contributed data to Language Map by Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (ARC grant CE140100041)

Once the enhance data from this project was crosswalked into OLAC, it was then visible through and part of the count of the Language Map created and maintained by Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (ARC grant CE140100041).

In this example below, OLAC has 4 items about Jawe, a language from the North Province of New Caledonia. 2 of the 4 items are publications held at the UHM Pacific Collection.

Digitized PALM publications

Front-end search form

Lovingly called the widget, this is the system created by Nackil Sung (Librarian in charge of Acquisitions at UHM Library) and Mike Chopey. This search form helps manage and keep track of the vast numbers of books being processed through the workflow.

Suggesting changes to the Library of Congress

As mentioned in the rationale for this project, library standards are not adequate for describing language. One outcome of this project is a list of languages and descriptions that will be proposed to the Library of Congress.

Pacific language list comparing standards