PARADISEC

PARADISEC advocates for the importance of repositories for cultural heritage materials, and discipline-specific repositories.{{cite journal |last1=Thieberger, Nick |first1=and Amanda Harris |title=When Your Data is My Grandparents Singing. Digitisation and Access for Cultural Records, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) |journal=Data Science Journal |date=2022 |volume=21 |issue=9 |pages=1–7 |doi=10.5334/dsj-2022-009 |s2cid=247965829 |doi-access=free }} Distributed and accessible online archives enable members of speaker communities to access records made of the language and musical practices.{{cite journal |last1=Barwick |first1=Linda |title=Turning it all upside down… Imagining a distributed digital audiovisual archive. |journal=Literary and Linguistic Computing |date=2004 |volume=19 |issue=3 |pages=253–263 |doi=10.1093/llc/19.3.253 |url=https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/19.3.253|hdl=2123/13114 |hdl-access=free }} This work aims to bridge the digital divide in a most practical way, building a repository with a simple ingestion system and an appropriate metadata schema to make it as easy as possible to add new items, and for them to be licensed and made accessible.{{cite journal |author1=Barwick, L |author2=Thieberger, N |title=Unlocking the archives. In Ferreira, V and Ostler, N (eds.), Communities in Control: Learning tools and strategies for multilingual endangered language communities |journal=Proceedings of the 2017 XXI FEL Conference |date=2018 |pages=135–139 |hdl=11343/220007 |url=http://hdl.handle.net/11343/220007}}

The collection currently contains roughly 15,440 hours of archived audio materials representing more than 1,346 languages from around 100 countries.{{cite web |title=PARADISEC metrics |url=http://www.language-archives.org/metrics/paradisec.org.au |website=OLAC}} This is supplemented by images, videos and text. Altogether, the archive contains some 202 terabytes of data in more than 409,000 individual files (as of January 2023).

The database of archived materials can be freely searched via the Open Languages Archives Community.{{cite book |last1=Thieberger, Nick |first1=Amanda Harris & Linda Barwick |title="PARADISEC: its history and future" in Research, Records and Responsibility: Ten Years of PARADISEC, Amanda Harris, Nick Thieberger and Linda Barwick (eds). |date=2015 |publisher=Sydney University Press |location=Sydney |pages=1–16 |hdl=2123/13877 |isbn=9781743324431 |url=http://hdl.handle.net/2123/13877}} Direct access to archived recordings requires free registration and sometimes needs permission as specified by the depositor.{{cite web |title=Nabu |url=https://catalog.paradisec.org.au/ |website=PARADISEC catalog}}

For secure archiving of audio files complete with metadata headers, PARADISEC uses the DOBBIN system, developed by Cube-Tec, which conforms to the BWF specifications of the European Broadcast Union (EBU). BWF files are archived with a digitally sealed 'header' comprising metadata exported from the PARADISEC catalogue. This sealed header also acts as a security device and prevents the archived BWF from any unauthorised edits, thus preserving the audio signal for posterity. It is also standard practice to produce smaller, more easily transported mp3 copies of each BWF, for the purpose of access. These too, are archived with the master BWF copies.

A large part of the project is the digitisation of valuable analogue recordings of languages and cultures from the Pacific region that will otherwise deteriorate and become unreadable. Researchers whose materials are represented in these collections include Arthur Capell, Stephen Wurm, Clemens Voorhoeve and Terry Crowley. These recordings may be stored on a variety of formats, but are mainly cassette tapes and reel-to-reel tapes. Analogue recordings are digitised at the international archive standard for PCM audio files of 24-bit resolution and a sample rate of 96 kHz.

PARADISEC is funded by a consortium of three Australian universities, including the University of Sydney, University of Melbourne and the Australian National University, as well as the Australian Research Council. PARADISEC's main office and primary ingestion stations are located at the University of Sydney in the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and secondary offices, comprising further ingestion stations, are situated at the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University. The archive is currently headed by Nicholas Thieberger (Melbourne) and [https://www.sydney.edu.au/music/about/our-people/academic-staff/amanda-harris.html Amanda Harris] (Sydney).

• PARADISEC is actively involved in training and supporting language workers and regularly provides recording equipment and advice to researchers and students undertaking fieldwork. They have held a number of field recording and sustainable data workshops and conferences, in the interests of ensuring recordings are made with archiving in mind.
• PARADISEC is a project to digitise endangered ethnographic recordings.
• PARADISEC in 2019 In 2019 received the [https://www.icsu-wds.org World Data System data seal]
• PARADISEC was in 2013 inscribed into the Australian Register of the UNESCO Memory of the World Program.{{Cite web |title=Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (Paradisec) |url=https://www.amw.org.au/sites/default/files/memory_of_the_world/australia-and-pacific/pacific-and-regional-archive-digital-sources-endangered-cultures-paradisec.html |access-date=2022-06-30 |website=www.amw.org.au |language=English}}
• PARADISEC is a CoreTrustSeal certified repository,{{Cite web |date=2017-06-28 |title=Core Certified Repositories |url=https://www.coretrustseal.org/why-certification/certified-repositories/ |access-date=2022-06-30 |website=CoreTrustSeal |language=en-GB}} and a regular member of the International Science Council's World Data System.{{Cite web |title=Regular Members — World Data System: Trusted Data Services for Global Science |url=https://www.worlddatasystem.org/community/membership/regular-members/@@member_view?fid=paradisec |access-date=2022-06-30 |website=www.worlddatasystem.org}}
• In 2023 PARADISEC's founding Director Linda Barwick became Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for significant service to the preservation and digitisation of cultural heritage recordings.

{{Reflist}}

• [http://paradisec.org.au PARADISEC project page]
• [https://www.sydney.edu.au/music/our-research/paradisec.html PARADISEC] University of Sydney

Category:Endangered languages projects

Category:Sound archives in Australia