  New ways of documenting and describing language via electronic media coupled
with new ways of distributing the results via the World-Wide Web offer a degree
of access to language resources that is unparalleled in history. At the same
time, the proliferation of approaches to using these new technologies is
causing serious problems relating to resource discovery and resource creation.
This article describes the infrastructure that the Open Language Archives
Community (OLAC) has built in order to address these problems. Its technical
and usage infrastructures address problems of resource discovery by
constructing a single virtual library of distributed resources. Its governance
infrastructure addresses problems of resource creation by providing a mechanism
through which the language-resource community can express its consensus on
recommended best practices.
