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Figure 1. Different kinds of interactions with the archive
2.1. Depositors
Primarily, depositors will be researchers that work individually or in teams
to gather and analyze linguistic materials. However, we can also imagine
that members of the speech community or other people interested in lan-
guage matters may want to contribute to a language archive.
Depositors of all types usually have their preferences for certain tools
and, consequently, for certain formats used in collecting and processing
language materials. Their choices are based on what they are familiar with
and usually guided by criteria such as user-friendliness and efficiency,
including the quality of the user interface. Field workers often have to deal
with difficult field work circumstances, i.e. they have to be flexible and
react quickly, which will also influence their choices, e.g. for certain types
of equipment that is optimized towards size and not towards the quality of
the recorded signal. For researchers, time is a major consideration, making
them unwilling to use tools they are not familiar with unless these signifi-
cantly increase their research productivity.
The depositors themselves are also potential users of the material they
deposit, i.e. they may have specific uses in mind when creating and deposit-
ing materials. For example, they may plan to produce a printed lexicon to
Individuals and teams deposit language materials.
What is delivered? How is it delivered?
Different types of users want to access material.
How is it delivered to them?
How is material stored?
How is it preserved?
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Paul Trilsbeek and Peter Wittenburg
be used within the speech community. As researchers, they often also have
specific academic publication plans.
In short, the primary focus of the depositor is on the nature of the crea-
tion tools and equipment, on the efficiency with which they can carry out
the documentation of a language, and on the type of presentation offered to
the primary communities they address – the research community and the
speech community they work in.
2.2. Users
Unlike depositors, the range of users of a language documentation can be
very broad. Among those who may want to use the material stored in lan-
guage archives are researchers, members of the speech communities, stu-
dents and teachers, journalists, and the general public. These groups have
very heterogeneous requirements with respect to the way in which the ma-
terial needs to be available and presented. For example, a researcher who
wants to carry out a structured search to look for a linguistic phenomenon
in some language will need a different kind of interface than a member of a
speech community who wants to find recordings of a certain ceremony and
listen to or look at the recordings. Researchers from different disciplines
may have completely different requirements with respect to the way they
want to search, browse, or view data in the archive. It is next to impossible
to say anything about possible usages in a few hundreds years. We cannot
know what next generations of users may want to look at.
Being faced with such a heterogeneity of possible wishes and major
uncertainties regarding future uses, we can only establish a number of crite-
ria for the way in which archived material should be gathered and stored in
order to cover as many usage scenarios as possible:
– The material should be of the highest possible quality given the current
state of technology;
– The material should be organized according to clear and documented
principles;
– All objects should be accessible as individual resources as the most neu-
tral form of representation, leaving it to the users to combine them the
way they need or like to;
– All decisions about encoding standards, file formats, etc., have to be
documented.
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2.3. Archivists
The main concern of the archivist is the long-term perspective: How can we
make sure that all the information on linguistic and cultural practices and
structures compiled in a language documentation will still be available and
accessible hundreds of years from now? In addition, an archivist has to deal
appropriately with depositors and users now.
Of primary importance for the functioning of an archive is a stable and
well-documented organization scheme, e.g. a metadata catalogue system
such as IMDI (ISLE Metadata Initiative), which is the basis for all deposit,
preservation management, and access operations. In general, the archivist
must have a neutral position and should not choose formats that are biased
towards certain usages. Nevertheless, almost inevitably there will be a cer-
tain bias towards certain core players – in the case of language archives,
documenting researchers, and speech communities.
2.4. Possible conflicts resulting from differing demands on a language
archive
The following examples demonstrate potential conflicts that can arise from
the differing demands of the three different players mentioned above.
1. Many field workers appreciate MiniDisc recorders since they are small
and easy to use. However, MiniDisc recordings come in a compressed
format which deletes parts of the original signal. Therefore, archivists
recommend making high quality and uncompressed audio recordings,
arguing that while for most current uses MiniDisc recordings are good
enough despite their compression algorithms, we do not know whether
this will indeed be true for future uses that we do not yet know about.
2. The archivist needs to store video sequences in the format most faithful
to the original (currently MPEG2), while users want to visualize video
streams via the web, which currently requires the use of formats such as
MPEG4 which make use of a higher compression rate.
3. Some depositors like to work with commercial spreadsheet programs
such as MS Excel when creating metadata. Archivists do not appreciate
this too much, since such programs produce a proprietary document
format which can be changed at any moment in time and which is not
openly documented. Also, data are not constrained with respect to struc-
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