Lisavedu

Lisavedu is a digital preservation initiative and platform aimed at safeguarding endangered cultural artifacts, with a particular emphasis on minority languages, oral histories, and archival manuscripts. The project seeks to provide a sustainable infrastructure for digitization, metadata curation, long-term storage, and open access.

Background and scope: It emerged from collaborations among linguists, archivists, librarians, and technologists who advocated for publicly accessible, standards-based preservation of intangible and tangible heritage. Lisavedu coordinates digitization workflows, manages rights and licensing, and promotes community involvement in collection development.

Technology and standards: The platform supports audio, video, text, and image assets and uses open formats (for example WAV/FLAC for audio, high-fidelity TIFF/JP2 for images, TEI or XML for transcripts). It adopts metadata schemas such as Dublin Core and TEI, with crosswalks to controlled vocabularies. It provides APIs for data access and interoperability, and employs redundant storage and periodic integrity checks to protect data.

Governance and access: Lisavedu is described as a community-governed initiative with an international advisory board and partnerships with universities, libraries, and heritage institutions. Access policies emphasize open access where possible, with license options for restricted materials; contributors retain rights over their data.

Impact and reception: Lisavedu is positioned as a resource for researchers in linguistics, anthropology, and digital humanities, as well as for community archives. It aims to enable large-scale discovery, encourage collaboration, and support sustainable preservation across generations.