02. Archiving for the Future

This workshop is based on the open educational resource (OER) Archiving for the Future: Simple Steps for Archiving Language Documentation Collections (Kung et al. 2020), a short course designed to aid people of all backgrounds to confidently organize born-digital and digitized language materials and data for deposit into any digital repository or language archive for long-term preservation and accessibility. Workshop participants will learn 9 simple steps that they can do before, during, and after creating or collecting language materials; these steps will help them to understand data management, organization, and curation, which in turn will 

facilitate the deposit of language documentation materials in a digital repository or language archive. Participants will learn

  • Differences between digital repositories and other types of storage or sharing platforms
  • Ethical and legal considerations throughout data creation and archiving
  • Data management strategies (e.g., file-naming strategies, informed consent, metadata collection, strategic file organization)
  • Collection planning to facilitate re-use (e.g., identifying target users and creating collection guides)
  • Strategies for managing access to sensitive data (e.g., access restriction techniques at various language archives and managing access in perpetuity).

Methods and Materials

  • Syllabus: A syllabus will be made available to participants ahead of the workshop.
  • Methods: This course will be taught through a combination of lecture, discussion and group activities that will be supplemented by readings and videos.
  • Materials: Course materials will be lecture slides and readings shared through the course’s CMS. 
  • Links: Links to relevant websites will be added to the workshop's syllabus.

Requirements

  • Prerequisites: None. Anyone is welcome to attend, regardless if they have already collected data that they want to archive or they are simply planning ahead for a time when they do have data to archive. 
  • Equipment: Participants are strongly encouraged to bring a laptop computer or tablet to access online course materials. If students have already created/collected materials/data that they wish to archive, they may bring (a sample of) the digital files and the associated metadata to work with for the class project.

Facilitation Team

Susan Smythe Kung and Jaime Pérez González