PARADISEC (the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Source in Endangered Cultures) is a University-based collaborative project that aims to preserve and make accessible Australian researchers' field recordings of endangered languages and cultures in the Asia-Pacific region. Established in 2003 at the University of Sydney, with nodes in several other Australian Universities, PARADISEC was established and developed in a networked world, taking advantage of Australian research infrastructure including high-speed low-latency research and education communications networks (GrangeNet, now AARNET) and networked digital storage via the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing's national Store facility (based at ANU). Our collections include audio, video, image and text documents.

This presentation will discuss the principles that have guided the establishment and development of PARADISEC's workflow processes, and summarise our current systems. Challenges have included the diversity of original media and formats, requirements for specialist metadata schema to describe and annotate materials in over 500 regional languages, negotiating complex intellectual property and authentication requirements of the various Universities and their computer systems, and generating support within our research communities in a complex and changing funding environment for Australian research infrastructure. We have also collaborated with computer scientists in a number of projects piloting innovative ways of delivering materials out of our collections online, delivered numerous training workshops for researchers and cultural centre staff, and established relationships with local cultural centres and other archives in our region.