7 Expressing Language Resource Metadata as Linked Data: The Case of the Open Language Archives Community

The Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) is an international partnership of institutions and individuals who are creating a worldwide virtual library of language resources.
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The library is virtual because OLAC does not hold any of the resources itself, rather it aggregates a union catalog of all the resources held by the participating institutions. A major achievement of the community has been to develop standards for expressing and exchanging the metadata records that describe the holdings of an archive. Since its founding in 2000, the OLAC virtual library has grown to include over 300,000 language resources housed in 60 participating archives.
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Because all the participating archives describe their resources using a common format and shared vocabularies, OLAC is able to promote discovery of these resources through faceted search across the collections of all 60 archives.
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