Metadata Editing and Collection Management

The MEaCoM project convenes a series of workshop bringing together key stakeholders including linguists, archivists, and software developers to develop a software requirements specification and associated use cases (or “user stories”) for a metadata and collection management tool. A beta version, dubbed laMeta, was released in March 2020 and is freely available for download.

Background The task of language documentation requires the researcher to manage a large amount of interlinked data, including raw audio and video recordings, photographs, transcription files, annotation files, lexical databases, responses to experimental stimuli, and field observations. While standards have been developed for archiving and preserving these data, linguistic data management prior to archive deposit is often ad-hoc and idiosyncratic, without any widely-accepted practice. In particular, no standard tool exists to manage digital files and associated metadata. At best, current practice is inefficient, resulting in delays prior to archiving and requiring significant additional investment of researcher time. At worst, these bottlenecks lead to indefinite delays, with the result that research products may never be properly archived.

Try it! Beta-release versions of laMeta for Mac and Windows are now available (2020-03-04).

For more information see the project website.