Collaboration and development for digital access to the Native American Languages Collection

FAIN: PW-269366-20

University of Oklahoma, Norman (Norman, OK 73019-3003)
Raina Heaton (Project Director: July 2019 to present)

Planning for the creation of online access to Native American language holdings at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, at the University of Oklahoma.  Planning would entail a series of workshops for tribal community members, linguists, archivists, and technology developers in order to share user needs and best practices in the design of language repositories.

The Native American Languages collection at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma is seeking funding for a collaborative project to plan the development of an online platform for the collection. The website will provide unprecedented access to the collection by allowing users to view and download materials directly, rather than the current system which requires people to visit the collection in person. This type of access fulfills our mission to make those materials that are meant to be shared as available as possible to Native peoples, researchers, and the greater public. We propose to hold a series of workshops designed to get input from NAL stakeholders (Native communities, linguists, educators), archiving professionals, and developers to create a user-oriented interface that will best serve the needs of our community of users. Information gathered from the workshops will be used to produce detailed mock-ups of the site.