Rutgers Optimality Archive - European Mirror

This is an experimental European mirror of ROA, the Rutgers Optimality Archive. This electronic archive houses hundreds of scientific papers on Optimality Theory, an important theoretical framework in linguistics. On some days though, it can be difficult or near impossible to access the archive at Rutgers university in the United States from sites in Europe, due to increased net traffic and slow connections. As a service to the European Optimality Theory community we therefore wanted to provide a second site, which should in general be better accessible.

Mirroring means that all changes in the original ROA site will be reflected at our site through automatic nightly file transfers (a transcript of last night's mirroring is available). Importantly, only the genuine /archive directory is duplicated at Duesseldorf university, not the colourful web interface nor the various search facilities. One principal reason for deviating from a full duplication here stems from the fact that we wanted to remove any access to US internet nodes. But some services offered by ROA-on-the-web, such as the search facilities as currently implemented, would trigger such accesses and cause slow-down being reintroduced through the backdoor. As time permits, we will design facilities similar to those provided by ROA. For the time being, to find and fetch a paper or piece of software from the archive, it is best to proceed as follows:

  1. Click on the ROA European mirror entrypoint. This opens a listing of all directories with the naming convention `ROA number-MonthYear'.
  2. Select the distinguished ROA-0 directory which contains the most recent OT bibliography, e.g. by clicking at `0-0294'.
  3. Click at the HTML version of the bibliography named *.html (current OT bibliography).
  4. Using the document search facilities of your web browser (e.g., edit-find in NetScape), locate the paper you are interested in.
  5. Remember the ROA number noted at the bibliographic reference and go back to the European mirror entrypoint, selecting the directory named after the ROA number (do not click on the highlighted ROA number itself, as it would currently initiate a web access to the Rutgers site).
  6. An alternative for newer papers whose number is unknown is to search in Rutgers, then go to the corresponding directory of the European mirror
  7. In that directory, texts in whatever formats were submitted may be found for subsequent downloading. However, these are mostly compressed (.gz ending), needing a (de-)compression program called gzip. Gzip is available for a large number of platforms including UNIXes and DOS, and can be found in many software archives that hold free GNU software. Decompression proceeds like this: gzip -d Paper.gz
  8. Paul Boersma has some nice tips & tricks on how to deal properly with PostScript-encoded papers (.ps file name suffix), which are frequently found in ROA. Have a look here if you or your readers are plagued by printing problems.

Markus Walther walther@ling.uni-duesseldorf.de