With the help of fund, received from the Finnish Ministry of Education and Cultures, we are developing the Uralica service that aims to bring together libraries and other institutions that possess digital content in Uralic languages. The latest addition was made last week, when we linked some digitized material from the Komi National Library onto Uralica. The linked material in Komi can be accessed here.
From time to time, we have invited the researchers of Uralic languages to share their views on the material that is made available at our Fenno-Ugrica collection. This time, Mrs.Sirkka Saarinen, the professor of Finno-Ugric languages at the University of Turku is giving her outlook to the recently published books in Udmurt language.
During last week, we released the monographs in Nenets and Selkup available in our Fenno-Ugrica collection. Sven-Erik Soosaar, a researcher of Tundra Nenets at the Institute of the Estonian Language (EKI) gives us a brief overview to this material and discusses the status of Samoyedic languages, which are at the edge of extinction, or have already perished.
The pace of releasing the new material is steady, but rapid in deed. In two weeks’ intervals, we are receiving new deliveries from the National Library of Russia (Saint Peterburg). Not long ago, we made the monographs in Mari languages available for the public in Fenno-Ugrica and now 72 monographs in Khanty and Mansi are in our collection too.
Last week, we did attended in the DATeCH2014 conference and Digitisation Days in Madrid. As we (the staff of DPKL) had a focus on the more technical issues, our fellow from Kirjallisuuspankki (The Bank of Finnish Literature), Anna Biström, shares her views on the event from a researcher’s point of view.
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I was heading to the second day of Digitisation Days full of energy. Being a father for a 6-months-old child, a long sleep at the hotel’s bed was a blessing in deed. A morning coffee with some nice bread without any interruptions made me feel like eating a forbidden fruit.
This time, the Digitization Project of Kindred Languages goes west and is attending the DATeCH 2014 conference and Digitisation Days in Madrid, 19-20 May. The Digitisation Days event is organised by IMPACT centre of competence and Succeed, both funded by European Union. Our team is attending this event in order to learn what is the current state of branch and to discuss the various aspects related to the text enhancement of digitized material. See the full programme here. You may track the comments made by the conference attendees in Twitter with the help of hashtag #digidays. This is our recap on the presentations, which took place on day 1.
The continuation of the Digitization Project of Kindred Languages goes onto next level today. We have now published the first set of monographs in our Fenno-Ugrica collection. The first set consists of 73 monographs in Hill and Meadow Mari languages from various fields of their vocabulary.
The Digitization Project of Kindred Languages is not only about the publishing material online, but within the project also a plenty of preservation and conservation work will be completed. Today, the National Library of Finland and its partner in Russia have agreed on the conservation work regarding the newspaper material of the follow-up project. The preservation and conservation work will be completed by the shores of Fontanka at the Federal Document Conservation Center, a department of the National Library of Russia. By the agreement, more than 30 000 pages of newspapers in Komi and Udmurt languages will treated to some extent during the Follow-Up Project in 2014 and 2015.
Our calendars for this summer are getting fully marked. In the previous posting, I mentioned that the Digitization Project of Kindred Languages will be one of the symposium organizers at XII International Congress for Finno-Ugric Studies in 2015. And recently, we have got some more news which are keeping us as busy throughout the summer.