The University of Queensland is moving to protect Australia's invaluable heritage of Indigenous languages with the development of a centralised digital archive.
The project, a collaboration with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) in the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA), aims to help Australia further understand and preserve its culture, history and heritage.
LDaCA Project Director, Professor Michael Haugh from UQ's School of Languages and Cultures, said Australia is a part of one of the most linguistically diverse regions in the world.
"More than a quarter of the world's languages are spoken in Australia and its region, including many hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages and dialects," Dr Haugh said.
"There are significant collections of materials on Indigenous languages and regional languages of the Pacific, as well as of Australian English, Auslan and other community languages.
"But they're all over the country in different libraries, archives, research data repositories - and in some cases, literally in a box under the bed.
"The digital archival repository being built at UQ marks the first large-scale effort to consolidate these materials at a single source and make them more accessible to the communities reflected in them."
LDaCA Program Manager, UQ's Robert McLellan, said the archival repository will also improve how researchers discover and access Australia's rich language data.
"Many language collections are inaccessible, under-utilised or at-risk, with researchers lacking the tools and skills to fully derive research potential," Mr McLellan said.
"LDaCA plans to bring them together into a national distributed archival repository.
"Language materials should also be shared in ways that collectively benefit Indigenous Peoples and represent the rights and interests of the respective communities.
"We're working closely with Indigenous communities to secure voices of Country, so they are honoured, valued and remain safe for future generations.
"In this UN International Decade of Indigenous Languages, it's vital that we combat the loss of languages by breathing life into language data and collections."
The project is part of the ARDC's HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons.
The ARDC is enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).
UQ's Dr Rose Barrowcliffe joins Dr Haugh and Dr Martin Schweinberger as a Chief Investigator on the project, along with new partners the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, the Australian Digital Observatory and the University of Western Australia.
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