I am honored to have been nominated to serve as a member of the ELRA Board. I am very familiar with ELRA, having been a supporter of ELRA since its inception in 1995 and have worked closely with members of its board over the years. I would therefore be thrilled to serve as a member of the board and to potentially have an impact on ELRA's further development as an umbrella organization for members of the language resources community.

Much has changed over the years since ELRA was established in terms of the ways in which language resources are developed, distributed, and used. The costs of data collection and linguistic annotation have decreased, thereby enabling the free distribution of many resources. The resource needs of the community have also changed to some extent, due in part to the recent development and use of large-scale language models to support machine learning. Correspondingly, ELRA's role in the community should continue to change as well in order to best accommodate the resource needs within the community and best serve the ELRA membership.

In fact, this moment is particularly appropriate for assessing and adapting to the needs of the community in terms of language resources. An account of current activity in resource development and use, especially in the light of the dominance of language modeling and transformer-based methods that have eclipsed, to some extent, the continued and equally necessary development of carefully constructed language resources for work in the field, would be a perfect starting point to establish a basis for ELRA's role in the years to come.

I would very much like to see ELRA become an international umbrella association for those who develop and use language resources of any kind. There is still a crying need for a central repository of information about what is available and where (especially for the "new" resources consisting of language models), which ELRA can provide for its members. Beyond that, ELRA can broaden its fostering of evaluation of resources and the technologies that use them and sponsor venues that address such evaluation, which is an ongoing need within the HLT community. Another area needing continued input and support is resource development for low-resource languages, which ELRA is ideally positioned to provide.

I believe I am well-qualified to serve on the ELRA Board due to my long history of involvement in the development and distribution of language resources and my activities in the field over the past nearly 40 years. I served as president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities from 1985-95 and in 1987 co-founded the Text Encoding Initiative, in which I was centrally involved for the following decade. From 1996-2005 I was co-editor-in-chief of the journal Computers and the Humanities (Chum), and since 2005 I have served as co-editor-in-chief (with Nicoletta Calzolari) of the Language Resources and Evaluation (LRE) journal, which is closely connected to ELRA. I have also attended (and served as scientific committee member) for every edition of the ELRA-sponsored Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC). In the 1990's, I was one of the project managers of the European MULTEXT and MULTEXT-EAST projects, which at the time were the first major efforts to develop high-quality multi-lingual language resources. In connection with those projects I was the principle developer of the Corpus Encoding Standard, and later was a central figure in the establishment of the ISO committee on Language Resource Management and co-developed the ISO Linguistic Annotation Framework (LAF). I was the principle investigator for the American National Corpus (ANC) project and its spin-off, the Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus (MASC. In 2007 I founded the ACL Special Interest Group for Annotation (SIGANN) and the SIGANN-sponsored Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW). Recently I've been involved in the development of the Language Applications (LAPPS) Grid, which enables easy-to-use, seamless development of workflows comprised of user-selected interoperable HLT modules.