Language Archiving, Resource Management LAMUS is a web-based service that allows researchers to deposit their language resources into a language resources archive. It was developed at the MPI for Psycholinguistics for stricter control of the archive coherence and consistency and allowing wider use of the archiving facilities without increasing the workload for archive and corpus managers. LAMUS is based on the use of IMDI metadata standard for language resources and offers metadata search and browsing over the archive.

The DAM-LR project aims at virtually integrating various European language resource archives that allow users to navigate and operate in a single unified domain of language resources. This type of integration introduces Grid technology to the humanities disciplines and forms a federation of archives. It is the basis for establishing a research infrastructure for language resources which will finally enable eHumanities. Currently, the complete architecture is designed based on a few well-known components and some components are already tested. Based on the technological insights gathered and due to discussions within the international DELAMAN network the ethical and organizational basis for such a federation is defined.

Metadata descriptions of language resources become an increasing necessity since the shear amount of language resources is increasing rapidly and especially since we are now creating infrastuctures to access these resources via the web through integrated domains of language resource archives. Yet, the metadata frameworks offered for the domain of language resources (IMDI and OLAC), although mature, are not as widely accepted as necessary. The lack of confidence in the stability and persistence of the concepts and formats introduced by these metadata sets seems to be one argument for people to not invest the time needed for metadata creation. The introduction of these concepts into an ISO standardization process may convince contributors to make use of the terminology. The availability of the ISO Data Category Registry that includes a metadata profile will also offer the opportunity for researchers to construct their own metadata set tailored to the needs of the project at hand, but nevertheless supporting interoperability.

It is an ongoing debate whether categorical systems created by some experts are an appropriate way to help users finding useful resources in the internet. However for the much more restricted domain of language documentation such a category system might still prove reasonable if not indispensable. This article gives an overview over the particular IMDI category set and presents a rough evaluation of its practical use at the Max-Planck-Institute Nijmegen.