Archiving Legacy Documentation from Southern California and the Southwest: Toward a New Collaborative Model

FAIN: PD-271354-20

University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94704-5940)
Andrew Garrett (Project Director: December 2019 to present)

The cataloging, preservation, and creation of online access to documentary materials related mainly to Uto-Aztecan and Yuman languages, assembled by four researchers over several decades. In addition, project staff would explore co-curation of these materials with members of the source communities.

The overarching purpose of this project is to make information about indigenous languages of Southern California and the Southwest accessible in a preservation repository. The project has two main goals. One is to catalog, safely preserve, and make accessible the extensive documentary materials assembled by linguists and anthropologists, mainly with Uto-Aztecan and Yuman languages. Included are well over 500 sound recordings and over 100 field notebooks from more than a dozen languages. We will catalog and preserve these materials; digitize the sound recordings, field notebooks, and other key items; and provide online access as appropriate through the California Language Archive (CLA). The second goal is to explore collaborative co-curation of CLA content by expanding a new prearchive process to facilitate community-based metadata creation, cultural knowledge labeling, and recommendations for access. Members of three indigenous communities will work with us to identify contents, participants, and key contexts of newly accessioned and digitized materials; provide cultural knowledge labels; and advise us on appropriate levels of public access.