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plex experiments to institutions that have special facilities and expertise for
the long-term preservation of data and providing advanced access possibili-
ties for them. It is thus not a coincidence that one of the key elements of the
DoBeS program for documenting endangered languages was the setting up
of a central archive for all materials collected within this program. This was
also based on the fact that the area of digital archiving is comparatively
new, that even traditional archives have to consider the new requirements
and adapt their strategies accordingly, and that in direct collaboration be-
tween documentation teams collecting new digitally archivable materials
and the archivist appropriate strategies for a close and mutually fruitful
collaboration have to be established.
While not all parties involved in the process of documenting languages
such as community members, researchers, funding agencies, etc., have to
be fully acquainted with the details of digital archiving, it is important for
an efficient and productive cooperation in this work that all parties under-
stand the basic issues and challenges involved in the archiving process and
take these into account with respect to their mutual expectations. The pur-
pose of the current chapter is to provide an overview of the basic challenges
associated with digital archiving, focusing on three major players in the
process: the depositors of the material, the potential users, and the archi-
vists. As we will try to show, these three types of players have different
goals, motivations, and preferences which may easily lead to conflicting
demands. First, we will briefly describe the characteristics of modern digi-
tal archives in relation to more traditional ones and then discuss the expec-
tations of the different players with respect to digital archives. In Sections 3
and 4, we will treat in more detail the conflicting requirements of long-term
preservation and short-term access. We will then look at how these require-
ments influence the interaction between depositors, users, and archivists. In
the last two sections, we will discuss aspects of access management and
give an outlook to future developments.
1. Modern digital archives
Traditionally, archives are focused on storing original physical objects – be it
sculptures, artifacts used in daily life, or information engraved in clay tablets
or on “old” paper. Generally speaking, not many people are allowed to have
access to these physical objects, and creating copies – if at all possible – is
an expensive and time-consuming process. But the nature of the material
was such that it made sense to make the preservation of the original objects
Chapter 13 – Archiving challenges
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the highest priority. Consequently, special environments were created in
order to meet preservation goals.
For modern digital archives, the survival of the physical object – the
storage medium – is in most cases not relevant. It is the information on the
carrier that we have to preserve independently, whether it represents texts,
sounds, videos, three-dimensional representations of artifacts, etc. However,
digital archives have to meet new requirements:
– The objects stored in the archive can be subject to change. For example,
a lexicon that was created by a documentation team will be further ex-
tended or new linguistic insights require modifications of the existing
structure;
– Users of the archive may want to add information about resources based
on their specific expertise. For example, a member of the speech com-
munity may notice that a rare bird can be heard on a certain recording
and may want to add the name of that bird. Or, a researcher may want to
draw relations between two or more objects in the archive and to share
this added information with others;
– The objects in the archive need to be accessible and searchable for dif-
ferent purposes. For example, people still speaking an endangered lan-
guage may decide to undertake language maintenance efforts involving
the training of young people and want to access archived objects for
creating course material. Or researchers may want to study the way in
which languages influence each other and therefore search for sets of
words or structures that provide evidence for contact phenomena.
These are only a few of the many possible scenarios in which different
groups of people want to gain access to material in an archive for different
purposes. In general we can say that modern archives for language re-
sources not only have to store data, but also grant easy access to these data
and, in certain cases, even allow modifications. The latter, in particular,
forms a big problem from the traditional archiving point of view.
A modern language archive thus has two main functions: long-term pre-
servation and short-term access. In the following section, we will see that
the requirements for these two functions are partly conflicting. As a conse-
quence, strategies have to be identified and agreed upon which allow for a
workable compromise between these conflicting requirements.
Before turning to these requirements, let us briefly review the different
types of data and media digital archives that store language documentations
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are confronted with. These include the following types of documents: anno-
tated recordings, lexica, sketch grammars, field notes, phonetic descrip-
tions, metadata, ontologies, and geographical information. Furthermore,
they will include a number of typical media types such as text, audio, video,
and image files. But there can also be other, more specialized data types such
as laryngographic or data glove recordings that document movements of the
vocal cords and the hands, respectively. Modern digital archives have to
accommodate all these different types of information. It should also be ob-
vious that archives containing language materials can become very large, in
particular because storing digital video recordings requires much storage
capacity.
2. Demands on language archives
Among others, we can distinguish the following three key players involved
in language documentations:
– The depositors, who make recordings and notes, create different sorts
of derived material, and hand this over to the archivist. Questions that
have to be addressed here include: In what form do the depositors de-
liver the material to the archive? Will the archive accept everything the
depositors deliver? What kinds of interactions are needed between the
depositors and the archive?
– The users, who want to use archived materials for various purposes.
Questions that have to be addressed here include: Who are the users? Do
they all have the same expectations? For what purpose will they use the
archived material? In what form do they need to access the archived ma-
terial?
– The archivists, who need to solve long-term preservation problems, or-
ganize the material in a consistent way, and grant access to resources to
those users who have access privileges. Questions that need to be ad-
dressed here include: What are workable backup strategies? How can one
automate updates to new formats and media? How can one regulate ac-
cess? How can one make changes to already stored materials tractable?
These key players have somewhat differing views of the tasks of an archive
and the problems it poses (see also Figure 1), as we will show in the fol-
lowing subsections.
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