Enhancing Indigenous Language Infrastructure

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Developing and maintaining infrastructure is important for enabling future research on disappearing languages. This award supports the modernization and enhancement of language infrastructure in one of the oldest and most important repositories of materials held in the country: the indigenous language collections held at the University of Chicago. The collections, some extending back a century, are currently dispersed across different units in the university, have been catalogued differently, and are difficult to access. To unlock the full scientific and social value of these collections, they need to be physically consolidated, uniformly catalogued, and readily accessible both to researchers and the public. The proposed enhancements will facilitate scientific and historical research on languages, support heritage-language maintenance and education efforts, and contribute to general public understanding of human cultural and linguistic diversity. The University of Chicago’s indigenous language collections include audio recordings in the Digital Media Archives, language texts in the Archive of Indigenous Literatures, unpublished linguistic and ethnographic manuscripts in the Manuscripts on Cultural Anthropology, and indigenous language instructional materials. These collections will be consolidated in the main library of the university, where the staff have significant experience in long-term digital preservation. This project integrates, standardizes, and enhances the heterogeneous metadata used in the collections. Basic library cataloguing standards will be uniformly employed and enhanced metadata on language, location, and content type will be provided. Links will connect related items across collections and one unified web portal for the consolidated collections will be developed. The portal will include efficient browsing and finding tools and provides guidance on how to navigate the site both for academic researchers and heritage speaker communities. For materials not in the public domain, the site will explain the procedures for obtaining access. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.