OLAC, the Open Language Archives Community, is an initiative to create a unified means of searching online databases of language resources for linguistic

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 research. The information about resources is stored in XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 format for easy searching. OLAC was founded in 2000.

OLAC advises on best practices in language archiving, and works to promote interoperation between language archives.

The OLAC metadata set is based on the complete set of Dublin Core

Dublin Core

The Dublin Core metadata terms are a set of vocabulary terms which can be used to describe resources for the purposes of discovery. The terms can be used to describe a full range of web resources: video, images, web pages etc and physical resources such as books and objects like artworks...

 metadata terms DCMT, but the format allows for the use of extensions to express community-specific qualifiers. It is often contrasted to IMDI

Imdi

IMDI is a metadata standard to describe multi-media and multi-modal language resources. The standard provides interoperability for browsable and searchable corpus structures and resource descriptions with help of specific tools...

(ISLE Metadata Initiative).