Toward a global infrastructure for the sustainability of language resources

Abstract

This paper describes work the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) is doing to contribute to a global infrastructure for the sustainability of language resources. After offering a definition of language resource, it addresses the issue of what makes language resources sustainable by defining six necessary and sufficient conditions for their sustained use, then discusses what it takes to make such sustainability a reality by describing the roles of four key sets of players—creators, archives, aggregators, users. With this background, the paper describes the community infrastructure OLAC has developed for allowing its members to express consensus about best practices for digital archiving, plus the technical infrastructure it has developed to provide aggregation and search for the language resources community. The concluding section probes the broader issue of sustainable development to consider the sustainability of language resources in the context of the sustainability of language development and of languages themselves.