Precious recordings safe at ANU

Languages on the verge of extinction will be heard by future generations thanks to an archiving project involving ANU.

At a ceremony last month, Head of the Department of Linguistics in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Professor Andrew Pawley was presented with 700 CDs of speech and music in 70 languages from Papua New Guinea, which will be stored at ANU. The disks represent almost 300 tapes made by former ANU linguist Dr Tom Dutton.

“Seeing the possibilities for research and community use that are possible with a technology like this has been a real eye opener for me,” said Professor Pawley.

“It’s very gratifying to know that not only will these endangered recordings survive, but that a great many creative new things can be done with them.”

The disks have been made following an ARC linkage grant to set up a digital archive to preserve the thousands of tape recordings of the languages and endangered musical traditions of Asia and the Pacific that have been made over the past half century.

The partners set up PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Resources in Endangered Cultures), with the main digitising facility based in Sydney. The delivery of the disks, PARADISEC's largest job so far, by Director Dr Linda Barwick from the University of Sydney, marks a milestone for the project.

Over 2000 of the world’s 6,000 languages are spoken in the region, but this number is expected to drop to a few hundred over the next century. The PARADISEC project aims to digitise and preserve thousands of old tape recordings.

To guarantee the recordings’ preservation, several copies are made and distributed to the partner organisations in case disaster strikes one storage facility.

The recordings will be made available online, and the communities where they were made will be able to access low cost digital recordings of their culture's music and language.

For more information visit:

www.paradisec.org.au