The Open Language Archives Community: An infrastructure for distributed archiving of language resources

New ways of documenting and describing language via electronic media coupled with new ways of distributing the results via the World-Wide Web offer a degree of access to language resources that is unparalleled in history. At the same time, the proliferation of approaches to using these new technologies is causing serious problems relating to resource discovery and resource creation. This article describes the infrastructure that the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) has built in order to address these problems. Its technical and usage infrastructures address problems of resource discovery by constructing a single virtual library of distributed resources. Its governance infrastructure addresses problems of resource creation by providing a mechanism through which the language-resource community can express its consensus on recommended best practices.