PARADISEC

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 from other researchers, community members, or anyone who has an interest in such materials.

As the number of small languages in the world is reduced by many factors (urbanization, 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 catalog. PARADISEC provides the infrastructure to deposit and locate these recordings.

The collection currently contains roughly 5,900 hours of archived audio materials representing more than 900 languages from around 67 countries. This is supplemented by significant amounts of images, videos and text objects. Altogether, the archive contains some 13.5 terabytes of data in more than 113,289 individual files (correct at April 2016).

The database of archived materials can be freely searched via the Open Languages Archives Community. Direct access to archived recordings requires registration and sometimes needs permission as specified by the depositor.

For the secure archival of audio files complete with metadata headers, PARADISEC uses the Quadriga 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 catalog. 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.

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