Primary contact
Charles Darwin UniversityDarwin, Northern Territory 0909
During the era of bilingual education in the Northern Territory, many books were produced at 20 Literature Production Centres in more than 25 languages. These materials are both widely dispersed and endangered, and contain interesting and significant stories in Indigenous Australian languages, with many beautiful illustrations.
The Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages project is creating a digital archive of this endangered literature, with permission from the language owners to make the materials available to community members, researchers and other interested parties through a searchable and extensible online repository. The result aims to be a living archive with connections to the communities where the books belong.
The project was funded in 2012 by the Australian Research Council, with partner agencies:
A successful second application to the Australian Research Council allowed the project team to expand the archive beyond the original bilingual schools, and to engage people in using the materials contained in the archive. Alongside existing partners, the Northern Territory Department of Education and the Australian National University, new partners joined the project:
The materials in the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages are available under a Creative Commons Australia license (BY-NC-ND).
Stories and pictures in this work belong to the Aboriginal language owners, creators of the work and their descendants.
For further information, see http://laal.cdu.edu.au/site/permission