Developing Infrastructure for a Computational Resource on South Asian Languages

The Computational Resource for South Asian Languages (CoRSAL) is a digital archive for source audio, video, and text on the minority languages of South Asia. The archive also includes derivatives of source files such as photographs, acoustic analyses, wordlists, dictionaries, grammars, and analytic aids.

The CoRSAL mission is to provide a stable archive for the deposit of such materials. The key features of the archive are:

• Findability: items in CoRSAL are easily located from a browser with keyword searches.
• Accessibility: the items in the CoRSAL archive are free for download or can be viewed online. The collections can be easily accessed via tablet and phone. Depositors can place access restrictions on individual items as they see necessary.
• Ease of deposit: CoRSAL provides training in data management to assist with data preparation for archiving, including file naming and metadata creation. Recognizing that uploading files can be a challenge in South Asia due to varying internet speeds, CoRSAL works with the University of North Texas Digital Library to upload deposits to the CoRSAL archive.
• Longevity: Because CoRSAL is part of the UNT Digital Library, the collections within CoRSAL are secure for the long-term. The UNT Digital Library meets international standards as a trusted digital repository.
• Ethical preservation: The focus of CoRSAL is on providing a service to those seeking a repository for their language materials. Deposits in CoRSAL are the result of respectful conversations between the depositor and CoRSAL staff. Depositors to CoRSAL may include academic and community language documenters, language activists, and linguistic typologists or theoretical linguists with language data.

This collection includes materials from yearly meetings since 2017 to build an infrastructure and workflow for developing CoRSAL, such as slides and recordings of presentations.