The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) is a cross-institutional project that supports work on endangered languages and cultures of the Pacific and the region around Australia. They digitise reel-to-reel field tapes, have a mass data store and use international standards for metadata description. PARADISEC is part of the worldwide community of language archives (Delaman and the Open Language Archives Community). PARADISEC's main motivation is to ensure that unique recordings of small languages are themselves preserved for the future, and that researchers consider the future accessibility to their materials for other researchers, community members, or anyone who has an interest in such materials.

Vanishing voices

As the number of small languages in the world is reduced by many factors (urbanisation, colonial policies, the speakers' desire to learn languages which give access to resources), the tapes which may be their only record become increasingly more valuable. Too many of these recordings are held in poor conditions and are not described in a public catalogue. PARADISEC provides the infrastructure to deposit and locate these recordings.

File types

For the secure archival 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 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

copies of each BWF, for the purpose of access. These too, are archived with the master BWF copies.

Digitisation

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 Arthur Capell (28 March 1902 – 10 August 1986) was an Australian linguist, who made major contributions to the study of Australian languages, Austronesian languages and Papuan languages. Early life Capell was born in Newtown, New South Wales ...

, Stephen Wurm, Clemens Voorhoeve and

Terry Crowley Terrence Michael Crowley (born February 16, 1947) is an American former professional baseball player and coach. He played in Major League Baseball as an outfielder and utility player from through , most notably as a member of the Baltimore Oriol ...

. 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.

Affiliations

PARADISEC is funded by a consortium of three Australian universities, including the

University of Sydney The University of Sydney (USYD), also known as Sydney University, or informally Sydney Uni, is a public research university located in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and is one of the country's ...

University of Melbourne The University of Melbourne is a public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in Victoria. Its main campus is located in Parkville, an inner suburb no ...

and the

Australian National University The Australian National University (ANU) is a public research university located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton encompasses seven teaching and research colleges, in addition to several national academies an ...

, 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 The Sydney Conservatorium of Music (formerly the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music and known by the moniker "The Con") is a heritage-listed music school in Macquarie Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is one of the old ...

, 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 Nicholas Thieberger is an Australian linguist and an Associate Professor in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. He helped to establish the PARADISEC archive in 2003 and currently serves as its Director. Thiebe ...

(Melbourne) an
Amanda Harris
(Sydney).

Other information

*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 was in 2013 inscribed into the Australian Register of the UNESCO Memory of the World Program. *PARADISEC is a CoreTrustSeal certified repository, and a regular member of the

International Science Council The International Science Council (ISC) is an international non-governmental organization that unites scientific bodies at various levels across the social and natural sciences. The ISC was formed with its inaugural general assembly on 4 July 20 ...

's World Data System.

References

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External links

PARADISEC project page
University of Sydney Endangered languages projects Sound archives in Australia