The best way to ensure that a language documentation collection gets used and cited is to include a collection description on its landing page. At a minimum, this description should provide some basic information about the collection that will allow a user to cite it. However, to make the collection truly useful, the description needs to provide the context and history of the collection. While some digital repositories will provide ample space on the landing page to allow you to write a detailed collection description, others will not. Thus, you might need to write a stand-alone collection guide that can be added to your collection and linked from the landing page. Since a guide is a stand-alone document, you can make it as detailed and elaborate as you wish. Read on to find out what makes an adequate collection description and how to write a detailed guide.  

Collection Descriptions

The main landing page of your collection in your chosen digital repository will certainly have a number of metadata fields identifying some basic information about the collection. At a minimum, enough information should be provided here to allow an archive user to cite the collection (Berez-Kroeker, Andreassen, et al. 2018; Berez-Kroeker, Gawne, et al. 2018); at best, there should be a collection description that contains (or direct users to) contextual information that explains the collection in broad terms to anyone who is unfamiliar with you, your project, your research, and/or the language(s) that are documented in the collection. If you had a grant or fellowship to carry out the project, it is important to acknowledge your funder in your collection description, as well.

Without any sort of collection description at all, a language documentation collection can seem impenetrable to an archive user. Take the Oxlajuuj Keej Maya’ Ajtz’iib’ Mayan Languages Collection, whose landing page in AILLA is shown in Figure 63 below, as an example. This collection has over 1,400 folders, but there is no information at all about this collection in either of the metadata fields pictured here that are meant to contain some sort of description (one for a description in English and a different one for a description in an Indigenous language). Anyone who wishes to use or learn more about this collection will have to laboriously click through pages and pages of folders to see the titles, and they might never learn the history of this group or project since the provided link to the organization is no longer active.

Figure 63:

An easy way to start a collection description is to extract relevant information from the original project proposal or prospectus, if there was one; otherwise a short description of the project is better than nothing. It is important to remember that creating a collection description is an iterative process; each time you add more materials to the archived collection, you should update the collection description to include those materials, the dates they were collected, new funding streams, and other relevant new information. As your collection grows, you might find that a short collection description in a metadata field in the repository software does not provide enough context to your collection or facilitate the use of your collection by other people. If this is the case, you should consider writing a collection guide, which is a stand-alone document that describes the collection, as well as its context and history. 

Collection Guides

A stand-alone guide to a collection summarizes the entirety of a collection in a single document. It serves to explain in detail the history and context of the documentation efforts, the people involved, the time frame, the funding streams, orthographic conventions, abbreviations, and any additional information that might be necessary for the collection to be accurately understood and reused. If this guide is accompanied by a comprehensive list of the collection’s contents, it can serve as a finding aid that can direct users to particular materials within the collection.

Writing and publishing a collection guide in a journal is an excellent way to announce your collection to your field, while also providing a published document that researchers can cite and that you can put on your CV. Some examples of collection guides for language documentation collections that were published as articles in the journal Language Documentation & Conservation include Caballero (2017), Gawne (2018), Franjieh (2019), Oez (2018), and Salffner (2015). However, you do not have to publish your collection guide; instead you could simply archive it in your collection and note or link it in the description field on the collection’s landing page, as was done by Möller Nwadigo (2018).

Stand-alone collection guides and finding aids are also useful for identifying collections that are split across multiple digital repositories, which can happen as archiving requirements and opportunities change across the life of a project. For example, a subset of the materials in the Gesture, Speech and Sign in Chatino Communities collection in ELAR (Mesh 2018) are also available in the Texas Data Repository collection Points of Comparison: What Indicating Gestures tell us About the Origins of Signs in San Juan Quiahije Chatino Sign Language Dataverse (Mesh 2017) since they were data specifically used in a thesis. In some cases, collection materials may have been replicated in two systems with differing arrangements reflecting their audiences’ different intended uses (Schembri et al., 2012; Gawne 2018). A collection guide can help users identify what materials are found where and determine whether one or the other repository would be better for their purposes.

There is also the matter of language access. Most digital data repositories and language data archives are designed to store and display metadata in only one language, typically English. Many, if not most, speakers and signers of languages featured in these collections do not read English, or would prefer to read in another language, and they could benefit from having a guide in some other language. A detailed list of contents with hyperlinks to items in a collection can serve as an alternative portal for users who prefer a different language, allowing them to access the collection’s contents without navigating its interface. Collection guides in other languages can be highly sought-after by users: the Spanish-language digital finding aid for the collection of Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez at the Harry Ransom Center is accessed twice as often as its English-language counterpart (Lule 2019). The language of the guide will most likely be one of the community’s languages, either the language being studied itself, or a regional or national language. For example, users of collections on Indigenous languages of Colombia, Benin, or Vanuatu may want to find information about those collections in Spanish, French, or Bislama, respectively.  When making a collection guide for the AILLA collection Baniwa of the Aiary and Içana Collection of Robin M. Wright (see Figure 64), it was decided that a Portuguese-language guide should be made since the Baniwa language community represented in the collection are far more likely to prefer to read Portuguese than the English or Spanish interfaces currently available on AILLA (Sullivant and Wright 2020). Note that even though some web browsers attempt to bridge this language gap by automatically presenting a machine translation of a website’s text, keyword searches will only be able to find terms in the language of the repository’s metadata. 

Figure 64:

It can be helpful to think about what kinds of information could be useful for a collection guide, and since quite a lot of information could be included, it is useful to think about what types of information should be included first, and what can be filled in later. Sullivant (2020) discusses writing collection guides for language documentation collections and prioritizes different kinds of information to include in a detailed collection description or guide. We do not go into any more detail about how to create a stand-alone collection guide in this course, but if you wish to write one, you can find the reference for Sullivant (2020) in the References.