A fascinating new language documentation project gets under way next week. The BOLD:PNG project (Basic Oral Language Documentation :  Papua New Guinea) involves training university students and literacy teachers to collect and curate oral texts from native speakers of the 830 indigenous languages of  Papua New Guinea, many of which are at risk of disappearing.

As the overview page for the site points out, this type of work has been done by linguists for years, however, this painstaking individual work can’t keep pace with the rate of language loss. The BOLD-PNG project addresses the problem of scale by training university students and literacy teachers to collect language data from native speakers over the course of the one-year project using voice recorders donated by Olympus.

For more on languages of New Guinea, check out the entries on New Guinea Languages, Papuan Tip Languages and North New Guinea Languages in the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, available online to UBC folks. The language lists in the entries on Papuan Tip Languages and North New Guinea Languages also  include location and approximate number of remaining speakers.

We have a number of books on Papuan languages in Koerner, including a key text called  Papuan languages of New Guinea by William Foley (part of the Cambridge language surveys).

Good luck to all involved in the project!

Just noticed a number of new books on African languages which have arrived in Koerner Library:

• The languages of urban Africa / edited by Fiona McLaughlin

• Globalization and the future of African languages / edited by Francis Egbokhare, Clement Kolawole

• Grammar of the Kilba language / Mohammed Aminu Mu’azu

• Coding participant marking : construction types in twelve African languages / edited by Gerrit J. Dimmendaal

• The languages of Africa and the diaspora : educating for language awareness / edited by Jo Anne Kleifgen and George C. Bond

• Negation patterns in West African languages and beyond / edited by Norbert Cyffer, Erwin Ebermann, Georg Ziegelmeyer

• Oral and written expressions of African cultures / edited by Toyin Falola and Fallou Ngom

• Globalization and language vitality : perspectives from Africa / edited by Cécile B. Vigouroux, Salikoko S. Mufwene

• Grammar of Yeyi : a Bantu language of Southern Africa / Frank Seidel

We have a strong collection of materials on African languages and linguistics. If you want to search the library catalogue for more, this Guide to Subject Headings, Classification, and Call Numbers for African Languages will help get you started.

If you’d like to browse the stacks to see what’s available, the call number ranges are below. The majority of the collection is in Koerner Library; some material is housed in the ASRS (storage).

PL8000-8844 African languages and literature

UBC Library has just subscribed to a new database of interest to Linguists – MIT CogNet.

MIT CogNet provides online access to resources from several fields, such as artificial intelligence, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy and education.

The platform provides an ever-growing electronic collection of relevant books, journals, conference proceedings, calls for papers and grey literature, and provides searchable access to ten major reference works published by the MIT Press.

The information page for CogNet is at:
http://toby.library.ubc.ca/resources/infopage.cfm?id=1517

Browse the list of eBooks here:
http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/

(Photo credit: ccarlstead)

Winter session exams begin on December 3 and go until December 17. The Linguistics exam schedule is here.

Did you know the AMS has an exam database with final exams from a variety of undergrad courses? Studying from previous years’ exams can be a great way to supplement your course knowledge and prepare for finals. Currently, the database has exams for these Linguistics courses:

• LING 310

• LING 316
• LING 317
• LING 319

Txtng : the Gr8 Db8 by David Crystal

“Do young people text as much as people think? Do adults? Does texting spell the end of literacy? Is there a panic in the media? David Crystal looks at the evidence. He investigates how texting began and who uses it, why and what for. He shows how to interpret its mix of pictograms, logograms, abbreviations, symbols, and wordplay, and how it works in different languages. He explores the ways similar devices have been used in different eras and discovers that the texting system of conveying sounds and meaning goes back a long way, all the way in fact to the origins of writing – and he concludes that far from hindering literacy, texting may turn out to help it.”
[Oxford University Press]

A reminder of an upcoming workshop of interest to MA and PhD students:

Phinished! How to Access Completed Dissertations & Theses

Wondering what a PHinisheD dissertation looks like? We now have access to tens of thousands of dissertations online from universities throughout North America and beyond. Learn to search for dissertations completed at UBC and elsewhere by program, topic or advisor. Then download the full text. We’ll use this guide: FAQ: Dissertations and Theses. And we’ll look at the website www.phinished.org for a bit of practical advice.

Wed 19 Nov 2008
12:30 PM – 2:00 PM
Koerner Library : Room 217
The session is free, but sign up here.

You’ve likely heard about RefWorks, the online citation management tool that allows you to save references for your research paper from online databases such as AnthropologyPlus and Google Scholar, and then formats your paper in the citation style of your choice. Perhaps you’ve had a chance to get started with RefWorks, but need some help in using its many features.

This Wednesday is your chance to find out more! Come to Koerner Library for a RefWorks session from 10:00am-312:00pm.

Workshop is free, but please register here.

Karen Hinton of Proquest will be offering training on the suite of Community of Scholars (COS) research tools the UBC Library, in partnership with the UBC Office of Research Services, has recently acquired on behalf of the UBC community.

When: Tuesday, November 4, 2008; 3:00 – 5:00pm, Koerner Library, Room 217.
Register for the session here.

The COS suite of research databases includes the following:

COS Funding Opportunities, the world’s largest compendium of available funding sources, with more than 25,000 current opportunities for grants, fellowships, and awards

COS Scholar Universe, an editorially controlled, keyword-searchable database with nearly 2 million profiles of scholars.

COS Papers Invited, a database of calls for papers for conferences and journal special editions.

COS Expertise, a profile management system that enables institutions to keep track of their faculty’s expertise and research work, with first-person profiles maintained by the faculty themselves.

You know that lots of journals and magazines are published on the web. But where? This workshop will show you where to look — whether you’re starting with a bibliography, an author’s name, a topic, or just an idea.

Mon 03 Nov 2008
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Koerner 216 (Arts Lab)
Workshop is free, but please sign up here.

UBC Library has joined SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Students for FreeCulture and 65 other institutions in the First International Open Access Day.

What is Open Access?

Open Access is a growing international movement that uses the Internet to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge. It encourages the unrestricted sharing of research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of science and society.
(From: http://openaccessday.org/what-is-open-access)

To help us celebrate this event we are proud to present a number of distinguished speakers in our community who will be describing how they participate in the open access movement.

Schedule of Events

Introduction to Open Access & cIRcle: UBC’s Information Repository
11am– 12:20pm
Joy Kirchner and Hilde Colenbrander (UBC Library)

Using Wikipedia in the Classroom: an OA medium for research and student work
1 pm – 1:40 pm
Dr. Jon Beasley-Murray (Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies, UBC)

The Public Knowledge Project: providing open source software for OA publishing
2 pm – 2:40 pm
Brian Owen (SFU Library)

Open Medicine: a peer-reviewed, independent, open-access general medical journal
3 pm – 3:40 pm
Dr. Anita Palepu (Internal Medicine, UBC)

OA Day Worldwide Webcast: taxpayer access to publicly funded research
4 pm – 5 pm
Keynote address: Sir Richard Roberts, Ph.D., F.R.S

Tuesday, October 14, 2008
11:00 am – 5:00 pm
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, Dodson Room (302)