ELAR regional portals: Step by step towards global accessibility

"ELAR regional portals: Step by step towards global accessibility" Presented by Jonas Engelmann, Vera Ferreira, Hanna Hedeland, Nils Hempel and Mandana Seyfeddinipur at the Language Documentation and Archiving Conference, Berlin & Online, 4-6 Sept, 2024 The Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) is a global digital archive that safeguards intangible cultural heritage from all over the world. The archive’s holdings comprise audio- visual language (documentation) collections in over 600 languages, with a majority of the languages being highly endangered. Due to the global focus of the archive, its designated communities – researchers, language communities, the general public – are equally distributed across the globe and partly only literate in local languages. With the current interface only available in English, ELAR is definitely not as accessible as it should be. Since the number of languages that could be considered relevant for a global archive make the localization of the entire archive including the collections’ metadata insurmountable, ELAR has opted to proceed step-by-step, creating different regional portals where collections from a particular geographical area are presented in a widely used language of the region (Ferreira et al 2023). In our talk, we will present ELAR’s first regional portal, the Latin American portal. With the implementation of the portal, we are developing an additional discovery layer based on the data and metadata of collections from the Latin American region hosted in the ELAR digital repository. For the portal, comprehensive curation work on the existing metadata was required, and some adaptations to the metadata schema became necessary to model the collections’ features properly and to allow for multilingual metadata. In our presentation, we will provide insights into the actual portal development, which include both the transformation of the IMDI metadata into RDF and its enrichment according to linked open data standards and also the development of the new flexible web interface that relies on a SPARQL database to present the materials for browsing and searching. Broader questions related to localization, usability and accessibility of language archives will also be addressed during the presentation.