The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) at the University of Texas at Austin is delighted to announce the launch of the second edition of the free online textbook Archiving for the Future: Simple Steps for Archiving Language Documentation Collections, available at its new, dedicated website, https://sites.utexas.edu/archivingforthefuture/, as part of the University of Texas Libraries Open Books Pressbooks Publishing Network at https://utexas.pressbooks.pub/archivingforthefuture/.
The textbook is a resource to aid people of all backgrounds in organizing born-digital and digitized language materials and data for deposit into any digital repository (not just AILLA) for long-term preservation and accessibility. The target audience for this course is anyone who is engaged in creating materials in or about Indigenous, endangered, under-documented, or minority languages as part of language documentation efforts, including language rights, maintenance, and revitalization. It was designed particularly for individuals or groups made up of academic researchers and/or Indigenous or minority language speakers and community members, though anyone may benefit from it. The curriculum follows simple steps to guide participants through three phases of work to organize language documentation materials for archiving, and it explains in detail what to do before, during, and after data collection to facilitate the long-term preservation of the data. The course is designed to be informative, engaging, and accessible to anyone, especially to those with no previous experience archiving collections of language materials.
The course material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-1653380 (Susan S. Kung and Anthony C. Woodbury, PIs; September 1, 2016, to August 31, 2020). The course is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en.
The first version of the course will continue to be available at the legacy Teachable site https://archivingforthefuture.teachable.com/ through 31 August 2027, though this site will not be updated. The Teachable site will be discontinued on 1 September 2027.
This textbook is currently only available in English. Spanish and Portuguese versions will be added to the website at https://sites.utexas.edu/archivingforthefuture/ as they become available.