Regular readers will know that many contributors to this blog (such as Peter Austin, Jenny Green, David Nash among others) do so under Jane Simpson's user account. This is because the blog's user accounts are managed as part of the University of Sydney's wider authentication system, meaning that only staff or students of the university could have an account.

Now, Jane Simpson has moved to the Australian National University, so we decided late last year to migrate the blog out of the confines of the Sydney University user authentication system and host it ourselves, on a server that PARADISEC won in 2008.

At the recent annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Pittsburgh Jeff Good of University at Buffalo and I organised a tutorial session (Friday 7th January, 1.5 hours) and poster session (Sunday 9th January, 3 hours) on the topic of metadata in language documentation and description.

The tutorial talks covered general topics such as how to design a metadata system and what it can be used for, what kinds of metadata researchers are collecting, how linguists' metadata relates to that developed by anthropologists and archaeologists, and what information archives need for the best description and preservation of language materials. The poster session presented specific case studies from on-going archiving projects.

Jeff and I are able to bring together field linguists, computational linguists, language archivists, anthropologists, and archaeologists to discuss the issue of metadata from an interdisciplinary perspective. The poster session included presentations of a number of archives of endangered languages materials and displayed their approaches to metadata.

One thing that became clear from the presentations and posters was that early work in language documentation starting around ten years ago was heavily influenced by library concepts (eg. Dublin Core), and that key metadata notions were interoperability, standardisation, discovery, and access (see, eg. OLAC, E-MELD, Farrar & Langendoen 2003 [pdf]). Today, however, we see more focus on expressivity and individuality in metadata descriptions that researchers are creating, and increasing emphasis on protocols, meta-documentation (documentation of the documentation itself), greater clarity on stakeholder rights and responsibilities, and more diverse ways in which researchers are creating and manipulating their metadata. There seems to be plenty of interest in the topic now too -- over 70 people attended the tutorial session and the posters attracted a lot of interest.

The abstracts, talks and posters are available for download here and there are blog posts about the sessions by Laura Welcher (including a subtitled video) and Ryan Dewey.

5th January 2011

Alongside all the talk about Last Speakers and loss of particular endangered languages, it is important to remember that not all the world's minority languages are endangered. Languages can be small (having relatively few speakers) and yet be strong, in the sense that they are spoken by everyone in the community and show no signs of language shift or replacement by some other language.

A reminder of this came last month when Steven Bird sent a message to RNLD email discussion list asking:

"Can anyone suggest the names of languages having small speaker populations that still have a good level of intergenerational transfer and good survival prospects?"

This elicited a number of responses that identified small and strong languages in Africa, Brazil, and the Australia-Pacific region (probably reflecting more the readership of the RNLD list rather than anything particular about these regions). The full details are here (scroll down to topic 13), but I thought a short summary might be of interest to readers of this blog.

3rd January 2011

Today marks the 20th anniversary of a symposium on "Endangered Languages and their Preservation" that was held on the 3rd January 1991 at the 65th annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Chicago. The symposium was organised by the late Ken Hale and featured presentations by him, Michael Krauss, Lucille J. Watahomigie, Akira Y. Yamamoto, Colette Craig (now Grinevald), and La Verne Masayesva Jeanne -- they were published, together with a contribution from Nora C. England, in revised form as a collection of "essays" in the journal Language in March 1992 (see Hale et al. reference below).

This was the first time that endangered languages was the topic of a symposium at a major professional association meeting, and it served as a clarion call to the discipline of linguistics to pay attention to the widespread loss of languages. Parallels were mentioned with biological species endangerment and after presenting a statistical overview Michael Krauss gave his dire prediction that "at the rate things are going the coming century will see either the death or the doom of 90% of mankind's languages". He asked:

"What are we linguists doing to prepare for this or to prevent this catastrophic destruction of the linguistic world? It behooves us as scientists and as human beings to work responsibly both for the future of our science and for the future of our languages, not so much for reward according to the fashion of the day, but for the sake of posterity. If we do not act, we should be cursed by future generations for Neronically fiddling while Rome burned."

Krauss called for documentation of the most highly threatened tongues and support and promotion of stronger endangered languages. Hale concluded the collection of essays by arguing that linguistic diversity is important to human intellectual life ‚ not only in the context of scientific linguistic inquiry, but also in relation to the class of human activities belonging to the realms of culture and art. He presented the ritual register of Lardil from Australia with its unusual phonology and lexicon (showing abstract semantic principles at work) as an example of this loss of human creativity.

How things have changed in the past 20 years. A quick glance at the programme for this year's LSA annual meeting shows that the study of endangered languages (and related topics such as language documentation and revitalisation) is now front and centre in mainstream linguistics. Here is a sample listing of sessions from the preliminary meeting programme:

Friday 7th January
08:00-09:00 Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation
09:00-10:30 Tutorial: Metadata in Language Documentation and Description
10:30-12:00 Symposium: Documenting Endangered Languages: NSF-NEH Del Projects in Honor of the 20th Anniversary of the LSA Panel on Endangered Languages
14:00-17:00 Symposium: Developing Orthographies for Unwritten Languages

Saturday 10th January
09:00-10:30 Symposium: Maps and Map Making in Linguistic Research
14:00-17:00 Symposium: Minority Language Contact

Sunday 9th January
09:00-12:00 Poster sessions on Metadata in Language Documentation and Description, Documenting Endangered Languages and Maps and Map Making in Linguistic Research

The Friday 9am session on Metadata in Language Documentation and Description, organised by Jeff Good and myself, will include presentations by linguists, archivists, cultural anthropologists and an archaeologist about how metadata is thought of and used across their various disciplines. It is probably the first time in a long time that specialists from anthropology and archaeology will be presenting at an LSA meeting, and hopefully opens the door for further collaboration in the future.

The LSA annual meeting is just the first of a whole series of endangered languages events that will be happening this year. In February there will be the second International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation in Hawaii on the theme of "Strategies for Moving Forward", and March will see the first Cambridge International Conference on Language Endangerment with the theme of "Language Endangerment: Documentation, Pedagogy, and Revitalization". In May we will be holding our annual Endangered Languages Week at SOAS that will include a workshop on "Applied Language Documentation in sub-Saharan Africa". And that's only the first four and a half months of the year!

So, happy anniversary endangered languages! May the field continue to grow and prosper as it has done in the past 20 years.

One such endangered genre is a literary tradition practised by the Sasak people of Lombok, eastern Indonesia, of writing on the dried leaves of the lontar palm (Borassus flabellifer), or, since the 1970's, on paper. The lontar manuscripts are written in Kawi, a form of middle Javanese, or Sasak, or a mixture of both. The manuscripts are read during performances which must involve several readers and an audience. Historical evidence suggests that this writing and reading tradition originated from contact between the Sasak and their westerly neighbours the Javanese and Balinese, who dominated various parts of Lombok at different times from the 17th to the 19th centuries. In a paper just published in Volume 8 of the journal Language Documentation and Description I discuss the tradition and argue that it is now endangered as there are probably only 100 people (among a population of 2.5 million) who can read the manuscripts, and performances are discouraged due to cultural associations which conservative Islamic groups on Lombok do not approve of.

The Makassarese people of south-west Sulawesi have a similar literary tradition which they call lontara' (which is also the name for the script used to write Makassarese and several other Sulawesi languages, including Bugis and Mandar). There is a separate old Makassarese script which was used to write lontara' before the Bugis script replaced it in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. There are collections of Makassarese lontara' in the Netherlands, Jakarta and the National Archives of South Sulawesi (written in both old Makassarese and Bugis scripts), most of which have been microfilmed and catalogued, but are deteriorating. Last year the South Sulawesi government is reported to have allocated IDR 500 million (about USD 55,000) for the preservation of ancient lontara' in the Archives.

Anthony Jukes of the La Trobe University Linguistics Department has been working on Makassarese for many years and he found that many of his consultants living in the city of Makassar knew of the Makassarese lontara' and that a small number of them could read manuscripts written on the Bugis script (quite a few scholars and specialists in the city are still good at reading Bugis lontara' in Bugis script). No-one is able to read lontara' written in the old Makassarese script.

Anthony was recently awarded a small research grant by the Endangered Archives Programme run by the British Library to investigate contemporary use of lontara' and to identify whether there were any additional manuscripts held in private hands which might be able to be photographed. He is currently in Sulawesi and reports by Google chat that in a village outside the city he has found:

"quite a few. In the kampungs people still write them. I found a lot from the 1950s onwards, written in exercise books in ballpoint pen, and a few that look like they are over 100 years old. Mostly they are writing them as information, to be read individually: histories, myths, mysticism, calendars for planting etc. I recorded some performances of people reading yesterday. I'm also making a few sample images and generally testing willingness of people to let them be photographed."

This is an exciting discovery and suggests that further research in collaboration with local scholars may well reveal a wealth of new material, as well as opportunities to document both the manuscripts and reading and writing performances.

One interesting aspect of Anthony's research is that he is using his personal Apple iPad to display photographs of lontara' in old Makassarese script from Dutch collections -- the iPad is ideal in that it has long battery life and enables easy and rapid access to images, as well as zooming in to parts of them. He writes:

"I showed some of the old men the old manuscript pictures on my iPad. One of them, Daeng Tiro, had never used a computer or even a mobile phone before, but he got how to use the iPad in seconds. He was piching, twisting, scrolling etc. like a pro. Steve Jobs would have been proud"

So, the latest technology meets an endangered genre and a pilot project turns up exciting new material and potential opportunities for documentation, preservation and research.

Note: Many thanks to Anthony Jukes for reading and correcting an earlier version of this post and for sharing his experiences and photographs.

In commenting on a recent blog post of mine about SOAS publication plans, Nick Thieberger raises a number of relevant and important issues for anyone publishing in our field. Getting comments like this is manna to me as a blog author since so many of my posts go uncommented upon (I know people are reading them because I can track redirects from Facebook and my home page via bitly.com, and just occasionally someone references the content of a blog post, as in the recently published Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork by Shobhana L. Chelliah and William J. De Reuse). It is also good to be challenged to clarify one's own thinking about issues, so thanks for the feedback, Nick.

I identified the following main four points in Nick's comments:

• 1. LDD should "move to an Open Access model for [its] content in the future"
  
• 2. content should be free and online because that makes it available to people who cannot pay and who would otherwise not be able to access it
  
• 3. having content online means you can measure downloads and the number of downloads measures impact
  
• 4. the current LDD business model should be replaced

I will respond to each of these points in turn.

LTU is where I got my first tenured job 30 years ago (just over two years after finishing my PhD -- ah, those were the days) and still the place I have worked the longest in a somewhat peripatetic academic career (summarised here. I went there in 1981 as first full-time head of the Division of Linguistics and by the time I left in 1995 the Linguistics Department was booming under the leadership of Foundation Professor Barry Blake. We had an excellent group of colleagues (several of whom went on to professorships themselves) and great students, including this blog's Nick Thieberger, now at Melbourne University and Hawaii.

After this time linguistics at La Trobe changed its complexion somewhat. In January 2000 the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology (RCLT moved from the Australian National University to La Trobe as an independent research facility not directly associated with the Linguistics Department. As the document [.pdf]) outlining RCLT's history up to 2006 puts it:

"Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, La Trobe had one of the leading linguistics departments in Australia (indeed, this was a major reason that RCLT sought to relocate here). The Department was then considerably weakened by retirements and resignations."

In 2008 RCLT itself saw leadership changes that led to retirements and resignations at the end of the year as the former Director and Deputy Director left to move to another Australian University.

And now the good news. RCLT and the Linguistic Department have recently hit the research jackpot with several successful large grant applications, including two highly competitive and prestigious Future Fellowships. These are five-year posts that, according to the Australian Research Council, were set up:

"to promote research in areas of critical national importance by giving outstanding researchers incentives to conduct their research in Australia. The aim of Future Fellowships is to attract and retain the best and brightest mid-career researchers."

Congratulations to Future Fellows Birgit Hellwig, who will be working on 'Verb semantics in the Baining languages, East New Britain (Papua New Guinea)' and Steven Morey, whose project is 'A multifaceted study of Tangsa: a network of linguistic varieties in North East India'. (Congratulations also to the only other linguistics Future Fellow, Mark Donohue of ANU).

These positions are bolstered by Yvonne Treis, who has an ELDP post-doctoral fellowship to work on a grammatical description of Basketo (Baskeet), one of the little known Omotic languages spoken in South Ethiopia, and Anthony Jukes, who will start a post-doctoral fellowship at RCLT in 2011 as part of an Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project 'The languages of Minahasa: documentation, description, and support'.

Well done La Trobe Linguistics!

This month the eighth volume of Language Documentation and Description (LDD8) hit the streets (you can order it at a 25% discount, and also get 25% off any of our other volumes ordered before 31 December 2010). It's a special issue on documentation of endangered oral literatures and is guest edited by Imogen Gunn and Mark Turin of the World Oral Literature Project (WOLP) at Cambridge. This is the first time we have had a guest edited issue, but it won't be the last.

Planning for the next three issues of LDD is already under way: LDD 9 is scheduled for mid-2011 and will be edited by Julia Sallabank. It will contain papers on endangered languages and sustainability, arising out of a workshop she and Friederike Luepke organised earlier this year, together with other papers and book reviews. LDD 10, scheduled for December 2011, will be a special issue on documentation of endangered languages and musics and will be guest edited by Jan-Olof Svantesson and colleagues of Lund University. LDD 11, scheduled for mid-2012, will be edited by Oliver Bond and Stuart McGill and will contain papers on issues in applied documentation for African languages.

Back in October 2002 when I first started work at SOAS and was planning what became the Endangered Languages Academic Programme (ELAP) I had a vision that we could start a publication series for the newly emerging field of language documentation (this was just one year after DoBeS began its main phase, and the same year that ELDP was launched). ELDP was holding the first grants meeting of its International Panel in February 2002 so I hatched the audacious plan to ask the panel members if they would stay in London for an extra day and present talks on language documentation in a workshop format. They all kindly agreed and then when Colette Grinevald (from Lyon), Dan Everett (who was at University of Manchester at the time), Eva Csato (Uppsala) and Nick Ostler (Foundation for Endangered Languages) heard about the workshop they offered to come and give talks too. I then asked David Crystal (author of the book Language Death who I had met in Australia in 2000) if he would present a public lecture to kick off the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, which he did on 28th February 2003. In retrospect this was all a bit crazy -- we had no staff other than myself and Zara Pybus, the then newly-appointed Administrator of ELAP, and we were also trying to write and get approved a new MA programme with all its constituent modules, plus appoint staff, recruit students, and so on. To add to the craziness, all the workshop presenters agreed to write up their papers for publication and did so within six months. SOAS colleagues Lutz Marten and Justin Watkins refereed them all, and Zara designed and formatted the whole lot so that in December 2003 we published Volume 1 of LDD.

Over the past eight years we have sold almost 2,000 copies of LDD (Volume 1 is still our best seller at 480 copies so far, with a respectable 50 copies per year still going out the door) and we normally sell around 500 copies in total annually. I think this is pretty respectable for what is effectively a "spare time" operation, as we have no dedicated publication staff and each volume is edited and published on top of our other usual obligations.

LDD is a small, though useful, source of income for us and helps support MA and PhD students through offering them paid part-time editorial work on production of the volumes that are edited at SOAS. On several occasions I have been asked why we charge for LDD rather than making it freely available, like the online journal Language Documentation and Conservation. The simple response is that we do keep the price of LDD as low as possible (try finding another similar linguistics publication of 250-300 pages that sells for GBP 10.00!) and that income from sales is the only way we can pay for editorial support and first class design and layout (by Tom Castle who does publication work on top of his usual day job as Digital Technician). This is particularly the case now that support for ELAP from Arcadia Fund finished this year (Arcadia will continue to support ELDP and the Endangered Languages Archive until 2016).

We are currently planning for the introduction of an online store for LDD in 2011 and are also looking at developing a new series of e-publications that will include articles published in the journal, as well as other new materials. Stay tuned for more details early next year.

At this year's American Anthropological Association (AAA) annual meeting that winds up in New Orleans today, Jeremy Sabloff, President of the Santa Fe Institute, delivered the AAA's Distinguished Lecture with the title The Circulation of Ideas: Anthropology and Public Outreach. According to the AAA blog his talk:

"was effectively a battle cry for anthropologists. Our motto shouldn't be 'publish or perish, but rather, public or perish', archaeologist Sabloff said to a crowd of fellow anthropologists. He noted how other scientific fields have their iconic scholars‚ think Stephen Hawking, or Cornell West, or Jared Diamond. But anthropology? With the exception of the deceased (Margaret Mead) and the fictitious (Indiana Jones), not so much."

The blog author goes on:

"Part of the problem has been university departments' traditional avoidance of the limelight. Worse yet, anthropologists who speak out in the media are often criticized by their colleagues. 'We shouldn't be sniping, but rather supporting, our colleagues who write op-ed pieces', Sabloff said. The lecture, which was as inspiring as it was bold, was met with wild applause, a standing ovation and likely more than a few anthropologists considering their future (however large or small) in the public spotlight."

For languages and linguistics, I think we actually beat the anthropologists hands down when it comes to recognised experts who get called upon to express their views in public forums, including the popular press. In the UK we have David Crystal, public language expert par excellence, while Dick Hudson has worked tirelessly to promote linguistics in education. Geoff Pullum can be relied upon to express an opinion about grammar and language pseudo-experts (or "grammar mavens"), especially via his contributions to the Language Log blog, and John Harris gets called upon whenever pronunciation gets a mention. The US has a range of public figures who have things to say about language, including Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, Dan Everett, Ben Zimmer, and so on.

In the area of minority and endangered languages, Gregory Anderson and David Harrison (who introduce themselves as "we're The Linguists"), in collaboration with National Geographic and the Living Tongues project, have achieved some prominence in public space around the world (the views of practitioners who are not "The Linguists" differ about the approach taken by Anderson and Harrison, as a snotty exchange in the Comments section of Language Log shows).

Anderson and Harrison's most recent venture, supported by the philanthropic arm of Google, is a dedicated channel on YouTube called "the National Geographic Enduring Voices YouTube channel". The goal is apparently to "allow many of [the world's smallest and most endangered] tongues to have a presence on the Internet for the very first time" so that "researchers, academics and communities can now collaborate more effectively on promoting language revitalization". This is a very worthy goal that is certainly in line with Jeremy Sabloff's call to arms.

So what is actually up there on YouTube, and does it meet the goal of promoting language revitalisation? Perhaps it is too early to say for sure yet, but I personally was disappointed by the available movie clips, especially in terms of their lack of contextualisation and the low production values some of them show. There are around 100 clips available and they range in length from 14 seconds to 25 minutes, with most being 2 to 3 minutes long. Some are "talking head" style lectures (like this one) while others are fascinating insights into local knowledge, like this clip about Koro medicinal plants -- except that it is in English!

One of the most popular clips (with 945 views) is a rap song in Aka performed by Songe Nimasow and Khandu Degio. It is surely popular because it is accessible and entertaining, but one has to wonder how it "promot[es] language revitalisation". The most popular clip (with 1,330 views), and one which I was fascinated to see, is Ganibe Sebo showing how to count in Foe, a language of Papua New Guinea. On several occasions I have heard Bernard Comrie present talks about what he calls "endangered numeral systems" and seen him demonstrate the use of body parts in Haruwai counting, but I had never before seen a native speaker present this. It's neat, but the context for why is is interesting and important rather than just bizarre (why 1 to 37 for heaven's sake?) is not given. Just imagine if the clip had begun with some contextualisation about how knowledge systems, like the use of body parts in counting, are under threat, perhaps even more than languages themselves, how much clearer the material now presented would be. I'm not wanting the clips to be didactic, just contextualised, and their significance clarified.

I could not understand the point of some of the clips, like this one of a Tuvan woman with her head down reading Russian but with no explanation of what it is that she is talking about (perhaps if I spoke Russian it would make more sense?). There is also this clip of a person sitting self consciously in front of an elaborate tapestry speaking about who knows what in who knows what language and for which the only information given is "Ay-Xerel Sambuu Interview". This kind of thing is reminiscentof the "look at the exotic animal" exhibits that zoos used to offer (though they usually had a sign up telling you which exotic animal it was).

So, this YouTube channel is an interesting idea and potentially an exciting place for endangered languages to "be public", but in its current form it falls far short of meeting its potential, in my opinion. I look forward to Anderson and Harrison doing something better in the future with the opportunities it offers.

Re-awakening languages: theory and practice in the revitalisation of Australia's Indigenous languages
Edited by John Hobson, Kevin Lowe, Susan Poetsch and Michael Walsh
Sydney University Press
ISBN: 9781920899554

The Indigenous languages of Australia have been undergoing a renaissance over recent decades. Many languages that had long ceased to be heard in public and consequently deemed 'dead' or 'extinct', have begun to emerge.

Geographically and linguistically isolated, revitalisers of Indigenous Australian languages have often struggled to find guidance for their circumstances, unaware of the others walking a similar path. In this context Re-awakening languages seeks to provide the first comprehensive snapshot of the actions and aspirations of Indigenous people and their supporters for the revitalisation of Australian languages in the twenty-first century.

The contributions to this volume describe the satisfactions and tensions of this ongoing struggle. They also draw attention to the need for effective planning and strong advocacy at the highest political and administrative levels, if language revitalisation in Australia is to be successful and people's efforts are to have longevity.

Order from:
Sydney University Press

Contents, etc downloadable from:
The University of Sydney Library eScholarship repository

You can browse the Sydney list - which is discoverable on the web, thanks to its software, the open source DSpace. A recent addition is Janet Watts' Conversational Analysis thesis, Children's Silences in Mareeba Aboriginal English. This list is incomplete of course, since our prodding isn't always successful. Oh, and ignore the awful handling of the authors' name - a weirdness induced by a mix of submitter and a rare DSpace glitch. Otherwise - a wonderful thing.

Friday this week (5th November 2010) marks a sad day for Aboriginal languages of the Pilbara region of Western Australia with the funeral of Alexander ("Sandy") Brown, the last fluent speaker of Ngarla. Sandy was born in 1930 near the De Grey River in the traditional country of the Ngarla which stretched eastwards for about 180 km along the coast from what is now the town of Port Hedland, and inland for about 50 km. Due to early white settlement in the area Ngarla population numbers plummeted in the 19th century, and by 1990 there were probably less than 20 speakers. Sandy was the last person to speak the language fully.

Sandy Brown was an highly talented person who was literate in Ngarla (he spoke several other languages, and worked with Alan Dench on Nyamal) and took great pleasure after his retirement in documenting his language. He worked with Brian Geytenbeek on preparing a dictionary of Ngarla from the 1980s until recently, and in 2003 he released a CD of 68 Ngarla yirraru songs with accompanying explanatory booklet (reviewed by Nicholas Smith who calls the CD a "testimony to Sandy's extraordinary memory; a memory saturated with the rich oral traditions of Pilbara Aboriginal life"). Sandy also recorded stories in Ngarla and one called Marlkarrimarnu Nganarna Witijayinta 'Playing with a Dangerous Thing' can be read here. He was also much involved in Native Title issues. I had the good fortune to meet Sandy about 15 years ago when Alan Dench and I visited Brian and Helen Geytenbeek in Port Hedland.

Since 2008 Sandy worked with Torbjörn ("Toro") Westerlund of Uppsala University who is writing a grammar of Ngarla for his PhD (his MA Sketch grammar is available here[.pdf]). As Toro says of his thesis in a recent email: "it now may not turn out to be as detailed in all respects as I had hoped".

RIP Sandy Brown.

Note: Thanks to Toro Westerlund for checking a draft. I alone am responsible for the content of this post.

Over the past two years Trace Foundation has organised various events, both exhibitions and lecture series on a range of topics, including minority and endangered languages, especially Tibetan. The series has included the following language-related symposia:

• Minority Language in Today's Global Society -- 22 November 2008
• Perspectives in Mother Tongue Education -- 21-22 February 2009
• Vitality and Viability of Minority Languages -- 23-24 October 2009
• Perspectives on Language Standardization -- 27 March 2010
• The Relationship between Language, Culture, and Ecology -- 24-25 September 2010

On 20-21 November 2010 the sixth and final symposium called Alive & Digital will be held, bringing together scholars and experts who have worked extensively on minority language preservation and new technologies. The main topics to be discussed are what technological breakthroughs lie ahead and how technology today is impacting linguistic minorities worldwide. The first day will involve a diverse group of speakers discussing past and present trends in the relationship between technology and language, and the second day will explore technological issues specific to the Tibetan language including the Tibetan font converter, Unicode, and iPhone applications.

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is requested.