LINGUIST List 12.3148

Thu Dec 20 2001

All: LINGUIST at LSA

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. linguist, Update and Invitation from LINGUIST

As in the past, LINGUIST will again be holding office hours at the LSA
convention, and we'd love to see you there. We always value your
comments and suggestions, and we would particularly like to hear your
thoughts about our latest projects and developments--our restructured
site with its new data-based search facility and LINGUIST List Plus
(LL+), as well as EMELD and the OLAC harvester.

You may have already noticed the effects of our new database. Over two
years in the making, this project is one of our most ambitious
ever. The crew has spent countless hours categorizing all the
information and links on our site, creating thousands of records which
are searchable by linguistic subfield and subject language. Soon the
whole website will have a new "look" which features this kind of
searching, but the search function itself is available right now.
Simply click on "Search by Subject Language" at the top of the
Dictionaries page, for example, and you will access a drop-down menu
of the languages for which LINGUIST has dictionary links. This
selective list is drawn from a table of nearly 50,000 unique and
alternate language names, which now resides on the LINGUIST site
(thanks in great part to the Ethnologue). Search for information on
all these extant and extinct languages and language families is
available at: http://saussure.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/pub/

We'd also like to hear what you think about LINGUIST List Plus (LL+), our
collaboration with Blackwell publishing. LL+ is a service, available
exclusively at LINGUIST, which allows individual access to Linguistic
Abstracts Online, Glot International, as well as discounts on
Blackwell's books and journals. If you haven't yet subscribed to LL+,
you can check it out at http://www.linguistlistplus.com/.

There's more...

EMELD, or Electronic Metatstructure for Endangered Languages Data, is
an NSF-sponsored collaborative project designed to preserve endangered
languages data as well as to aid in the development of digital archive
infrastructure. With the help and cooperation of the linguistics
community world wide, LINGUIST will proudly host:

- A LINGUIST List digital archive housing data from 10 endangered languages.

- A "showroom of best practice", offering EL data marked up and catalogued
according to community consensus about best practice.

And...

As part of its pursuit of the objectives of EMELD, LINGUIST has joined
forces with the newly formed Open Language Archives Community. As the
primary OLAC service provider, we will become the "union catalog" of
language and linguistics-related resources on the Internet. At
http://saussure.linguistlist.org/olac/, you can search over 11,000
records by type and subject language from the archives of twelve
participating OLAC organizations and institutions:

The OLAC harvester (a.k.a. the EMELD metadata server) will be launched
at the OLAC symposium (Friday, 2:00-4:30PM, Grand Ballroom B).

So, as you see, LINGUIST has been developing and changing--we think
for the better. But we'd like to hear what you think. If you have the
time, please stop by to say hello. You can even pick up a LINGUIST
t-shirt or the new LINGUIST tote bag!


Have a good New Year!

Helen, Anthony, Andrew