PARADISEC: Background statement for the APAC Data Collections workshop, 18 October 2005

Abstract

PARADISEC (http://www.paradisec.org.au) is a cross-institutional research initiative established in 2003 by the Universities of Sydney, Melbourne and the Australian National University, joined in 2004 by the University of New England. Funded by the Australian Research Council's Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities Programme, participant institutions and Grangenet, PARADISEC offers a web-enabled facility for collaborative digitisation, management and access to Australian researchers' ethnographic recordings of endangered languages and musics of the Asia Pacific region. The collection is housed in APAC’s store facility, where it is managed by Stuart Hungerford. Since portable field recording equipment became readily available in the 1950s, many thousands of hours of ethnographic recordings have been made by Australian researchers. These unique and irreplaceable records are now in danger of being lost to future generations because of the impending obsolescence of analogue recording formats, deterioration of the original tapes, and orphaning of the collections as their creators retire or die. Before PARADISEC, there was no Australian repository available to salvage recordings made in the Asia-Pacific region. Indexing orphaned collections preparatory to digitisation was an important step in itself: our catalogue of 2400 records currently includes data on 390 languages from 50 countries in our region, previously inaccessible information that is now accessible worldwide via our web catalogue. As well as salvaging old recordings, we provide a facility for deposit and management of current research collections and advice on data creation and management for researchers planning future field trips. Our data collection hosts material recorded as long ago as the early 1950s and as recently as 2005.