Research groups from the universities of Nijmegen, Amsterdam (UvA), and Utrecht have decided to prepare a nationwide, open access multimedia archive of language pathology data collected in the Netherlands, primarily on Dutch. In this enterprise, as many other research groups as possible, both from universities and care and educational institutes, will be involved. Although data sharing is becoming increasingly important to widen the scope and depth of empirical research in all kinds of areas, no tradition has been established yet in language and speech pathology research. This means that in various places a wealth of relevant and precious language data exists that cannot be easily and optimally accessed and exploited.

The aim of the present project is to curate five existing, digital data sets, in order to make them available for scientific research in CLARIN-compatible format. This is a first, major step in the development of a VALID data archive.