Peter K. Austin
Department of Linguistics, SOAS
23rd December 2008
Due to the hard work of Mike Franjieh who is doing a PhD on a language of Ambrym, Vanuatu, the Endangered Languages Project at SOAS now has an on-line catalogue of the more than 300 books and journals we have acquired over the past few years. The materials in our collection come from several sources, including:
- donations by publishers, such as the Atlas of the World's Languages that we launched two years ago
- donations by colleagues, including ELDP grantees, of outputs from their research projects, such as Adivinanzas en mixteco a collection of stories in Mixteco, from Mexico. Some of the materials in this part of the collection are otherwise difficult to find in Europe
- MA dissertations written by students in the MA in Language Documentation and Description, including original work with native speakers of endangered languages, such as Aromanian, Bajjika, Dolpo, Dulong, Khasi, Khorchin Mongolian and Uighur
Materials in the collection are available for consultation in the Rausing Room, a purpose-built research facility for staff, students and visitors which also houses public access computers and equipment, such as kit for digitisation of tapes and cassettes.
We welcome additional donations of books and journals on endangered languages to the collection -- please contact Mike Franjieh (217081 AT soas.ac.uk) or Peter Austin (pa2 AT soas.ac.uk) if you are interested in contributing.
Comments
Did I miss something or are the MA theses really not available online? It seems to me that would be the easiest thing to offer open access to - wouldn't it be great if the students' hard work would be accessible to a greater public?
Posted by: mark (the ideophone) | December 31, 2008 04:25 AM
Thanks for the comment, Mark -- we are planning to make PDFs of the MA theses available and are working on getting IPR clearances for them at present. They will go up in batches as this gets sorted.
Posted by: Peter Austin | January 2, 2009 04:44 AM