Toward Fostering a Community Beyond Institutional Walls: Tone Perfect as a Case Study

This chapter delineates the anatomy of a long-term library-faculty partnership using as an example Tone Perfect, an award-winning multimodal database for Mandarin Chinese, developed by an interdisciplinary team and launched in August 2017 at Michigan State University (https://toneperfect.lib.msu.edu/). Since then, the library-faculty partnership led by the authors has been focused on building and supporting a community of global users who utilize the audio assets for various projects, including experiments in second language acquisition, machine learning models, acoustic analysis, not to mention games and apps as learning tools. A portion of the users have been willing to share their project outcomes with the public through the Tone Perfect website, thereby contributing to a data ecosystem centered around the database and gradually creating a clearinghouse of Mandarin audio-related projects.