Speech audio archives and CLARIN metadata

The issue of metadata is crucially intertwined with interoperability, accessibility, and re-use of research data. On the other hand, such issue is particularly cumbersome in the case of speech and oral archives, which are often scattered among different public and private institutions. From this respect, the aim of the European Common Language Resources and Infrastructure for Social Sciences and Humanities (CLARIN) is to provide easy access to digital written, spoken, video, multimodal language data and at the same time to offer advanced tools to discover, annotate, and analyse them. The paper presents CLARIN and its Component MetaData Infrastructure (CMDI) and it further discusses the relevant profiles for the description of speech and oral archives. Since Italy has recently joined the CLARIN infrastructure consortium, it additionally analyses the accessibility of Italian corpora via the Virtual Language Observatory (VLO) and via the Parlare Italiano web portal.