The digitization of over 2,700 sound recordings of Native American languages on wax cylinders held at the University of California, Berkeley, Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, using optical scanning techniques developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The University of California, Berkeley, is the repository of an American cultural treasure in over 2,500 early twentieth-century wax cylinder recordings of Native American speech and song. Some are the only known recordings of a language; many are the only known recordings of particular songs or stories; all are invaluable for scholarly research and the broader purposes of cultural and linguistic revitalization. Previous work using mechanical playback methods to transfer the recordings to modern sound media and digitize the result yielded low-quality sound files. This project will apply new technology (developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) to produce optical scans of all wax cylinders in the university’s collection, from which improved audio transfers will be created. At UC Berkeley, the work will involve institutional collaboration among the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, the University Library, and the Department of Linguistics; collaboration with Native communities will increase access to the resulting material.

Enchanced description of and access to linguistic materials, including fieldwork notes, manuscripts, and audio recordings that document over 130 endangered American Indian languages.

The University of California, Berkeley, has sponsored language documentation throughout California and the American West since 1901. For the past 55 years this work has largely been undertaken by linguists affiliated with the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (SCOIL). The products of this research and that of other linguists included field notes, manuscripts, and audio recordings housed in four Berkeley repositories. The Bancroft Library and Hearst Museum of Anthropology hold most of the older records; materials collected since 1952 are housed in SCOIL and the Berkeley Language Center. Together these collections form the largest university archive of Native American language materials and one of the five most important American linguistic archives of any kind. Despite its importance, this material is inconsistently described, making it difficult to locate resources related to a specific interest. With the assistance of a professional archivist--who is also a trained linguist with experience in language documentation--the project's staff would improve the quality and quantity of information in the SCOIL catalog; create metadata records conforming to the Open Language Archiving Community standard to share information across institutions; devise a controlled vocabulary for California languages that relates the designations used by both scholars and Native communities; and develop a Web interface to provide access to full metadata for all SCOIL collections and abbreviated metadata for related resources at other Berkeley repositories, as well as links to digitized SCOIL materials. The project would also support Native American community revitalization and documentation efforts. Access and use policies would be refined, and staff would provide professional and research support to community-based projects.