OLAC, the Open Language Archives Community, is an initiative to create a unified means of searching online databases of language resources for linguistic research. The information about resources is stored in XML format for easy searching. OLAC was founded in 2000, and is hosted at the Linguistic Data Consortium webserver at the University of Pennsylvania.
OLAC advises on best practices in language archiving, and works to promote interoperation between language archives.
Language documentation (also: documentary linguistics) is a subfield of linguistics which aims to describe the grammar and use of human languages. It aims to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community.
Language documentation seeks to create as thorough a record as possible of the speech community for both posterity and language revitalization. This record can be public or private depending on the needs of the community and the purpose of the documentation. In practice, language documentation can range from solo linguistic anthropological fieldwork to the creation of vast online archives that contain dozens of different languages, such as FirstVoices or OLAC.
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