A CLARIN Knowledge Centre (K-Centre) is a certified institution or consortium recognized within the CLARIN research infrastructure for its expertise in specific areas of language resources, technologies, or services. K-Centres support the scholarly community by providing access to expert knowledge, training, and guidance on the creation, processing, analysis, and reuse of language data. They operate as helpdesks for researchers, offering personalised consultancy and documentation. Integrated into a broader European network, they collaborate with other centres to ensure the exchange of best practices, alignment with interoperability standards, and the sustainability of linguistic research tools and data. Their work strengthens CLARIN’s mission to make language resources and technologies accessible and usable for researchers across disciplines. For more information, visit the CLARIN Knowledge Centres page.
K-OAr, the CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Oral Archives in Italy, supports researchers, archivists, and cultural institutions in all aspects of working with oral sources. It offers guidance on preserving and digitizing speech archives, helping to ensure their long-term accessibility in digital formats. K-OAr also assists with the legal and ethical dimensions of managing oral data in Italy, including informed consent procedures in line with the GDPR, copyright issues related to spoken materials, and the drafting of agreements such as co-ownership or donation contracts.
The centre provides advice on privacy protection and ethical responsibilities, and helps users describe and organize their data through appropriate metadata and access frameworks. In addition to supporting the reuse and dissemination of oral sources—particularly with strategies that reconnect materials to their communities of origin—K-OAr offers training resources, downloadable templates, and events for skill development. It also provides technical expertise in speech technologies, including transcription workflows, automatic speech recognition, and part-of-speech tagging tailored to oral archives.
The centre can be contacted via the Help Desk on this page. Once the request is received, the centre commits to responding within three working days, forwarding it to individuals with the appropriate expertise.