The 'reach' of Digital Language Archives: towards criteria for evaluation

Abstract

Over the last decade, and with the help of digital media and technologies, archives (with the focus here on archives for endangered and minority languages) have extended their focus from preservation to also becoming facilities for dissemination. Their innovations have largely been on ‘discovery’: firstly by encouraging digitisation and inclusion of analogue and obscure materials, and by partnership with funding institutions to support the creation of new, ‘born digital’ language resources; and secondly through online provision of language resources via web catalogues driven by standardised metadata and in some cases providing enhanced discovery through web portals aggregating the holdings of multiple archives. These advances have increased the visibility, relevance and authority of archives for language-related disciplines and for language-speaker communities. This paper considers a broader set of parameters describing the ‘reach’ of archives, where ‘reach’ includes (a) archives’ understanding of their key audiences in order to provide appropriate services for them, e.g. identifying a range of relevant audiences, their languages of access, their varied technological and information literacies, interface design and usability; (b) discovery, drawing on the understandings of audiences in order to help them browse, navigate, search, identify and select their items of interest; (c) delivery, i.e. making available selected resources according to users’ preferences whether by download, view-in-browser, through apps or other means; (d) access management such that resource delivery follows depositors’ and communities’ preferences, and where users have ways of applying for and negotiating for access; (e) information accessibility, where the actual desired content is accessible to users, whether in terms of contextualisation or appropriate complexity, language, or modality; and finally (f) feedback channels, where users can utilise the archive to provide feedback to depositors or to enhance deposits with user-generated content. Through considering how a number of archives are providing such services, we can see their transition from repositories of memory to facilities for fostering participation and understanding.