Today we are celebrating the Erzya language day. Erzya is one of the Uralic languages and it is spoken in the Republic of Mordovia in Russia.
During the Digitization Project of Kindred Languages, we have paid a special attention to the materials published in Mordvinic languages, Erzya, Moksha, Shoksha. Erzya was converted into a medium of popular education, enlightenment and dissemination of information pertinent to the developing political agenda of the Soviet state.
Fenno-Ugrica collection was released in June 2013 to support the research of Uralic studies in humanities. At that time, there were around 700-800 downloads on the monthly basis, which wasn’t that bad, I reckon. Actually, I was rather happy to notice that there are people who are using our stuff, even though some might consider the amount of monthly downloads as low.
The past two days were spent at the premises of Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies, where I participated the Big Data Approaches to Intellectual and Linguistic History Symposium. In this blog entry, I will grasp briefly some discussed topics.
We are proud to announce that the latest, and extensive, set of linked materials in Uralica portal has just been released. This time, the National Library of Russia has offered more than 2300 links to the digitized monographs and newspapers in various Uralic languages.
Dear readers! I have a pleasure to announce that we have completed the second stage of the continuation phase of the Digitization Project of Kindred Languages by releasing all the pre-selected monographs in our online collection, Fenno-Ugrica. It is a milestone reached, indeed!
From time to time, we do invite researchers to share their views on the materials, which have been published in our Fenno-Ugrica collection. This time, mme Merja Salo from the University of Helsinki discusses the current state of written Ob-Ugric languages.
/ Jussi-Pekka
The 12th Bibliotheca Baltica Symposium will be held at the Södertörn University on the 9th and 10th of October 2014. Bibliotheca Baltica, says the website, aims at uniting all types of libraries in the Baltic Sea Area in recognition of their joint responsibility to increase their efforts in preserving, developing, cataloging, publicizing, and making accessible their part of the Baltic Sea Area heritage. With 10 membering countries, I reckon, it is a beautifully formated goal for this consortium of research libraries.
The digitization of materials in Finno-Ugric languages in the national libraries operating in the Russian Federation has grown significantly during the past few years. Many Russian libraries have established their own digital collections and given the public either full or restricted access to the materials. The assumption is that the digitization and improved accessibility to Finno-Ugric materials both old and new promotes the language learning of native speakers of these languages. These Finno-Ugric languages can be thought to represent a crucial resource or the worldview of their communities, cultures and traditions – and culture, traditions and the worldview are best transmitted in free use of the native language.
Recently, we have linked some new collections onto Uralica in co-operation with the National Library of Komi and University of Tartu Library. The material from Komi contains musical notes and manuscripts of local composers, whereas the linked documents from Estonia consist of writings in and about the Livonian languages.
/ Jussi-Pekka
The continuation phase of the Digitization Project of Kindred Languages (2014-2015) took off in January 2014. Since then, we have conducted the copyright clearance for all material that will be digitized and published by the end of this year. Also, naturally, we have signed the needed agreements with the National Library of Russia on digitization of the material. Not to mention, there’s a great deal of work done behind the scenes: the development of our OCR editor has taken a step forward, and a plenty of time has been spend on post-production of material here in Helsinki. By the mid-July, we have published exactly new 400 monographs in Khanty, Mansi, Hill and Meadow Mari, Nenets, Selkup, Komi-Permyak, Komi-Zyrian and Udmurt in our Fenno-Ugrica collection. We more than are glad that we have passed the first round of release now.