Training, Archivists, and Language Collections

Abstract

Language archives play a vital role stewarding language resources—the evidence of language diversity and linguistic cultural heritage. Training archivists to appropriately and effectively manage language collections and engage with their diverse audiences is important to the re-use and curation life-cycle of language resources. Existing training materials related to language archives are often oriented towards depositors, both language scholars (Kung et al., 2020; Miller, 2023) and language-community members (CORSAL, 2024). However, university curriculum specifically addressing language resources and their management is rarely seen in archival-science and library-science training programs. We report on the development of an open-access curriculum to fill this gap and how language collections have been integrated into several courses in the training of information professionals within American Library Association certified graduate degree programs and linguists.

Our work products include a four-module semester-long course and dual deployment of project-developed content in courses including: Corpus Linguistics, Field Methods, Advanced Metadata, Cultural Heritage Stewardship, etc. Some of the important themes addressed include: Fiduciary responsibility, Language identification, Intra- and inter-resource relationships, Resource’s of-ness, Interactive modality and materiality, and Evaluation of community language archives.The selection of these areas of emphasis is informed by assessments of students’ and practitioners’ knowledge gaps (e.g., Aljalahmah & Zavalina, 2023a, 2023b; Zavalin & Zavalina, 2023; Zavalina & Burke, 2021).

As language research becomes more prolific and the need for language resource preservation is growing among both scholars and language communities, a variety of roles within library and archival praxis require training to support these diverse audiences. Our training gives exposure to information professionals who will:

Review prospective deposits including data management plans,

Produce ephemeral online interactive experiences containing source materials and the derivative scholarly record,

Conduct curation, collection maintenance and migration tasks, as well as

Plan and evaluate digital infrastructure systems for the long-term stewardship of language-resource collections.

Tags: Training Curriculum Development Language Archives Stewardship
Categories: Peer Reviewed Conference
Content Mediums: MovingImage Text Event