David Nathan

“ We can identify the participants and stakeholders in documentation as a prelude to considering what should be provided in terms of access. Firstly, there are the documenters themselves, typically linguists (and, occasionally, academics from other fields) who have received grants to do various kinds of documentation projects, together with the others in their teams who perform the various activities associated with running a project. Crucially, there are the language speakers and consultants, their families and communities. ”

“ Most of these are digital archives because documentation is inextricably linked with digital technologies in four ways: digital recording has made portable, high quality recording affordable; long term preservation of audio and video is possible only through lossless digital copying (IASA 2005) ; most researchers use computers to annotate media and create data and analysis in general; and the World Wide Web has become the ubiquitous platform for accessing documentation materials.
A digital documentation archive has to be more than a data repository. ”

“ The archive functions as a searchable container for those materials. ELAR uses Web 2.0 interactivity to provide a dynamic access process. Depositors can edit metadata for their collection at any time, including the metadata that governs access. More importantly, the archive “plays out” protocol throughout its interface (see Figures 3–6) , always letting users know which resources they can and cannot access, and offering a method for individual access to otherwise restricted resources through direct application to the depositor (via “subscription”) . ”

“ Focus on primary data: documentation is based around collecting and analysing a range of primary language data Interdisciplinarity: documentation requires expertise from a range of disciplines, not just linguists. Its data should be available and accessible to a wide range of users Involvement of the speech community: collaboration with community members not only as consultants but also as co-researchers Archiving: materials should be preserved and made available to a range of potential users into the distant future Figure 1. ”

“ In Facebook [...] account holders build and participate in virtual communities by choosing who are to be their ‘friends’—who are in effect the people who are permitted to see and interact with their presence on the site. In the same way, ELAR provides a channel for users to find and approach depositors to request access to materials, and for depositors to decide who will be their ‘subscribers’. ”

“ Although requiring accounts limits wider access to ELAR’s open (U) resources, we think this is a cost worth bearing. As described above, the subscription process supplies depositors with reliable information about requesters, including validated identities and archive usage history [16] . We do not support user anonymity; rather, we provide depositors with information about access of their collections. These components of a protocol system help to build and maintain a high level of trust and confidence on the part of depositors and their language consultants. ”

“ Compare this situation to that of libraries or businesses whose data is anchored in concepts such as title, author, page, quantity, cost, and item code all of which are well-established, stable, and correspond to real-world objects, rather than the contestable interpretations of linguistics. ”

“ ELAR prominently signposts protocol throughout the website not only to guide users through the new interface [28] , but also to embody a commitment to depositors’ protocol choices.
Sometimes things play out in unpredictable but serendipitous ways. Recently a researcher described a West African community’s responses to some archive websites. The community has only recently been connected to the Internet, and they mainly use sites such as Facebook, for social purposes. ”

“ Researcher role is available to relevant practitioners, for example linguists or teachers; applications for Researcher role are evaluated by ELAR staff and if approved apply across all collections in the archive. ”

“ They can choose to only search for accessible items, or they can request access to items where necessary. And at any point, users know why they can or cannot access particular resources.
Figure 6. This user has subscription rights to this resource in the ELAR website. Image by ELAR/David Nathan, 2012. Searching, browsing and metadata So far I have described the role of protocol in navigating ELAR’s resources. ELAR also provides search and browse functions. Its search is fairly standard, offering a stemmed search over all archive metadata [18] . ”

“ Data Access and Protection Rules DAPR-V2, see Online Sources.↑ See Online Sources for The Archive of the Indigenous Language of Latin America.↑ Although Facebook is used here to exemplify social networking, the newly released Google+ better resembles ELAR’s model because it distributes a user’s friends into “circles” just as an ELAR deposit provides various user roles; Facebook treats all a user’s friends as a single group, see Online Sources.↑ See, e.g. ”