European Cultural Heritage Online - ECHO

languages are, probably, the least known languages contributing to the cultural heritage andlinguistic diversity of Europe.Only a little more than 30 recipients of the letter of invitation responded that they would beclearly interested in participating in the ECHO project, and only 10 of them responded withdetailed descriptions of their data or with samples of metadata and an informal commitment tocontribute larger amounts of metadata and data to the ECHO project.Workshops and trainingTo strengthen the recruitment procedure, workshops with metadata training sessions wereorganized. The goal of such an event is to guide the participant/potential provider throughsteps 1 and 2 in the recruitment scheme below, and to prepare him/her for steps 3 and 4.1) convey the concept of ECHO and language resources2) describe own data and produce metadata sample3) produce all metadata4) produce the dataFour events of this kind have been organized:1. Local Lund workshop, April 7-82. Sign Languages, MPI-Psycholinguistics, May 7-83. Minority Languages, Lund, May 19-214. ECHO workshop in connection with International conference on minority languages,Kiruna, June 5A tentative conclusion from the workshops we have organized so far is that workshopparticipation is an efficient road to real understanding of the power of metadata, which, in itsturn, is conducive to ECHO commitment. The combination of letters of invitation, web-basedinformation propagation, and workshops have so far resulted in that browsable metadatadomains from 10-15 institutes/projects/organisations are in progress. The budding network ofproviders is briefly described below:Minority languagesMPI-PLHelsinkirich collectionsSaamiPhonogrammarchiv, Viennaunique material (UNESCO Memory of the world register)collections of Basque, Celtic, Inuit from 1900-1910specialised digitization skills (wax rolls...)25000 recordings, in total 7000 hours (selection, of course)University of Groningen and University of St Petersburg8