Towards a Distributed Digital Library for Sign Language Content

The Internet provides access to content in almost all languages through a combination of crawling, indexing, and ranking capabilities. The ability to locate content on almost any topic has become expected for most users. But it is not the case for those whose primary language is a sign language. Members of this community communicate via the Internet, but they pass around links to videos via email and social media. In this paper, we describe the need for, the architecture of, and initial software components of a distributed digital library of sign language content, called SLaDL. Our initial efforts have been to develop a model of collection development that enables community involvement without assuming it. This goal necessitated the development of video processing techniques that automatically detect sign language content in video.