6.2 Selecting and Transferring

Selecting

Rather than thinking of the archive as a storage place for your collection, think of the archive as a means of showcasing your collection for today, and also for posterity. With that in mind, select what you want to archive, considering:

  • The end-users of your collection: Will it be a community member seeking a long lost recipe, a language teacher looking for folktales for a lesson plan, or a linguist seeking data for linguistic analysis?
  • The level of language endangerment: You will want to prioritize those sound and video materials that cannot be easily replaced. For many of the highly endangered languages we work on, this might mean all the material you've collected.
  • The stability of content: If you have analyses that are ongoing, you may choose to only archive the primary audio and video data at first. For annotations you plan on changing, you might host these on a platform you can easily update, such as project website.
  • The reproducibility of materials: In some cases, an annotation grid from an acoustic software like PRAAT can be very useful for phonetic and phonological analysis. However, the PRAAT annotation grid is easily reproducible if both transcription and translation are available.
  • Cost: If you have to pay for archiving, how much have you budgeted for archiving? What funding sources are available if needed?

Transferring to the Archive

  1. Contact CoRSAL and develop a schedule for archiving: We suggest an incremental archiving plan starting with your audio and video source files and later including annotations. We will work with you to create a SayMore project which will then start you on the process of file naming and annotating audio and video source files.
  2. Discuss and sign the digital rights agreement.
  3. Upload your materials and metadata to a shared folder.
  4. Work with CoRSAL staff to describe your materials and collection.

We realize that uploads may be difficult due to connectivity and speed issues depending on your location. When CoRSAL team members are in India, depositors can make arrangements to meet with them to discuss your collection, metadata, and transferring copies of your files. If digital file transfer is not possible, we can arrange to pick up files loaded on physical hard drives. Please contact us for more information.