Introduction
Archiving for the Future: Simple Steps for Archiving Language Documentation Collections
Introduction
Welcome to Archiving for the Future: Simple Steps for Archiving Language Documentation Collections. This is a resource to aid people of all backgrounds to confidently organize born-digital and digitized language materials and data for deposit into any digital repository for long-term preservation and accessibility. The target audience for this course is anyone who is engaged in creating materials in or about Indigenous, endangered, under-documented, or minority languages as part of language documentation efforts, including language rights, maintenance, and revitalization. It was designed particularly for individuals or groups made up of academic researchers and/or Indigenous or endangered language speakers and community members, though anyone may benefit from it.
The curriculum follows simple steps to guide participants through three phases of work to organize language documentation materials for archiving, and it explains in detail what to do before, during, and after data collection to facilitate the long-term preservation, accessibility, and reuse of the data. The course is designed to be informative, engaging, and accessible to anyone, especially to those with no previous experience archiving collections of language materials.
The course opens with a brief overview of the history of archiving materials that document indigenous languages. Thereafter, it is organized into three phases: before, during, and after data collection. Each phase is further broken down into simple steps that you can follow as you arrange your language documentation collection for archiving.
Phase One: Before Data Collection
Step 1: Choose your archive
Step 2: Name your files
Step 3: Understand metadata
Step 4: Pick enduring file formats
Phase Two: During Data Collection
Step 5: Collect metadata
Step 6: Evaluate your files
Phase Three: After Data Collection
Step 7: Prepare your deposit
Step 8: Practice progressive archiving
Step 9: Describe your collection
Each of these steps is presented as stand-alone content in this course. While we recommend that you start at the beginning and work your way through the phases and steps in the order they are presented, you can jump around the content according to your needs. Each step includes some learning objectives at the beginning and lists of vocabulary terms, links, and references for further reading at the end.
It will take approximately 3 to 5 hours to complete the entire course.
If you need a certificate of completion, you will need to enroll in the course and complete all of the units.
Acknowledgement & Attribution
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-1653380 (September 1, 2016 to August 31, 2020). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
This work, Archiving for the Future: Simple Steps for Archiving Language Documentation Collections by Susan Smythe Kung, Ryan Sullivant, Elena Pojman, and Alicia Niwagaba, is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 International.
5 comments