Book Title: Archiving For The Future: Simple Steps For Archiving Language Documentation Collections

Book Description

“Archiving for the Future” 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, revitalization, and reclamation. It was designed particularly for individuals or groups made up of academic researchers and/or Indigenous or endangered language speakers/signers and community members, though anyone who creates digital files that need to be arranged, shared, and preserved for future use may benefit from it.

The course opens with a brief overview of the history of archiving materials that document indigenous languages. Thereafter, it is organized into three phases ow work: before, during, and after data collection. Each phase is further broken down into simple steps that guide participants through the work of organizing language documentation materials for archiving in order to facilitate the long-term preservation, accessibility, and reuse of the files and the data and information they contain. The course is designed to be informative, engaging, and accessible to anyone, especially to those with no previous experience archiving collections of language materials.