Building a MARC-to-OLAC crosswalk: repurposing library catalog data for the language resources community

Christopher Hirt, Gary Simons, Joan Spanne

Abstract: The Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) is an international partnership of institutions which are building a network of interoperating repositories and services to create a worldwide virtual library of language resources (that is, resources that document, describe, or develop the more than 7,000 known languages of the world). OLAC uses a community-specific refinement of qualified Dublin Core [http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/metadata.htm] along with a community-specific refinement of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting [http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/repositories.htm] to maintain an aggregated catalog of the holdings of the 35 participating archives. OLAC recognizes that the language resources of interest to the community come not only from sources within the community but also from many sources outside the community. This poster describes one approach we have developed for addressing this issue, namely, a crosswalk that transforms the MARC21 catalog for a library or archive into an OAI static repository that holds an OLAC metadata record for each MARC record identified as describing a language resource.