LAC Depositor Guidelines
These guidelines are intended to assist you in becoming a LAC depositor and provide you with the information you need to prepare your data for submission. If these guidelines and the linked documents do not answer all the questions you have or otherwise do not meet your needs, please contact the LAC-Helpdesk.
Becoming a depositor
A depositor is a LAC user with the rights to deposit data into one or more collections. If you want to deposit into an existing collection, we need the collection owner to notify us, so that we can grant you depositor rights. If you want to start a new collection, please contact us so that we can set up the collection and add the required information to its metadata. To become a depositor you will also have to sign the LAC Depositor Agreement.
If you want to become a depositor, please contact the LAC-Helpdesk, and provide us with information about the data (data types, volume of data, legal situation of the data), so that we can grant depositor rights to your account.
Ethical Issues & Data with disclosure risks
As a depositor, you need to be a holder of rights to the data – or the only holder of rights to the – and/or you need to be entitled to act with the permission of other parties that hold rights. Basic Metadata will always be accessible in our repository, additional metadata (e.g. information about participants) can be stored separately and its access can be protected. In individual cases, protection of personality, privacy rights, as well as indigenous intellectual property (traditional knowledge), compliance with national law or local norms of the speech community, as well as embargo arrangements, may preclude disclosure and free circulation of the data itself under open licences. More sensitive data may even require to be archived on TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) long-term storage facilities that are not accessible via the web due to disclosure risks. This aspect must be specifically observed in audio-visual language data which typically depicts consultants and performers in human interaction. The LAC will provide guidance as early as possible as to the best way to ensure that no sensitive data is at risk of accidental exposure while still ensuring that datasets are discoverable and citable.
Collections, bundles, and files
The LAC consist of three types of units: collection, bundles, and files. Collections contain bundles and bundles contain files. A file is always part of a bundle and a bundle is always part of a collection. Deposits consist of one or more bundles and need to be submitted to one particular collection.
Collection are sets of bundles with a shared origin and/or topic. The prototypical collection consists of data from one research project or research team and have one consistent object language. Data from unrelated research projects, even if they share a single object language, should always be archived in different collections. A project that gathers data from more than one language should consider archiving the data sets in individual collections for each object language. However, related consecutive research projects may submit data to the same collection. If you are unsure whether your data would be better archived in an existing collection or in a new one or whether as one single collection or as two or more separate collections, please contact the LAC-Helpdesk.
Bundles consist of a metadata file and any number of data files, in particular audio or video media files and accompanying annotations. Ideally, a bundle represents a single recorded event or any other salient unit of recording, documentation, or analysis. In particular, we recommend to keep bundles simple in structure. A single annotation file and the media files linked to this file plus supporting material (such as other annotation formats or pictures documenting the tasks and setup) are a prototypical bundle. Please avoid bundles with more one set of annotation file with its associated media files. If your bundle contains more than one annotation file of the same type, chances are high that the data would be better archived in two or more bundles.
Files are the most basic entities the archive will handle. The LAC accepts a list of file types and file formats. The list of acceptable file formats can be found in the Whitelist.
A more detailed description of acceptable file types and best practices for preparing your data can be found in the Submission Guidelines.
Depositing
To prepare your data for submission, please follow the information in the Submission Guidelines. The LAC has currently no deposit interface for users. Please contact us, so we can arrange the transfer of your submission ready data to us. After a compliance and consistency check, we will put your data into the LAC repository.
If you have any remaining questions, please contact the LAC-Helpdesk. We are also always happy to hear back from you with any suggestions or feedback which helps us improve our submission process.