  The Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) is an international partnership
of institutions and individuals who are creating a worldwide virtual library of
language resources. The Dublin Core (DC) Element Set and the OAI Protocol have
provided a solid foundation for the OLAC framework. However, we need more
precision in community-specific aspects of resource description than is offered
by DC. Furthermore, many of the institutions and individuals who might
participate in OLAC do not have the technical resources to support the OAI
protocol. This paper presents our solutions to these two problems. To address
the first, we have developed an extensible application profile for language
resource metadata. To address the second, we have implemented Vida (the virtual
data provider) and Viser (the virtual service provider), which permit community
members to provide data and services without having to implement the OAI
protocol. These solutions are generic and could be adopted by other specialized
subcommunities.
