“ When new publics consume, manipulate and connect with field recordings and digital archival repositories of linguistic and cultural content, their involvement raises important practical and ethical questions about access, ownership, and permanence. These issues are reflected in a current trend among funding agencies, including the World Oral Literature Project’s own fieldwork grants programme, to encourage fieldworkers to return copies of their material to source communities, as well as to deposit collections in institutional repositories. ”

“ Until relatively recently, few indigenous peoples have had easy access to effective tools to document their own cultural knowledge, and there is still little agreement on how collections of oral literature should be responsibly managed, archived and curated for the future.
The online archiving of audio and video recordings of oral literature is a technique of cultural preservation that has been widely welcomed by indigenous communities around the world. ”

“ Innovative digital archiving techniques support the retrieval of granular metadata that is relevant to specific research interests, alongside providing an easy way to stream or download the audio and video files from the web. In this manner, we have been able to connect recordings of oral literature to a broad community of users and researchers. In turn, this contributes to an appreciation of the beauty and complexity of human cultural diversity. ”

“ Collecting, protecting and connecting oral literature This volume is an essential guide and handbook for ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists, librarians, and all who connect with indigenous communities in order to document and preserve oral traditions.
For societies in which traditions are conveyed more through speech than through writing, oral literature has long been the mode of communication for spreading ideas, knowledge and history. ”

“ Field demonstrates how oral traditions such as trickster tales form an important body of knowledge that not only preserves cultural values and philosophical orientations, but also continues to instill these values in listeners. ”

“ The authors conclude by reflecting on the yet harder questions of ownership that arise when scholars make use of audio-visual media and when the final video document is available on the Internet. They offer elegant solutions by considering individual as well as collective indigenous peoples’ rights, and advocate for stronger collaborations between researchers, performers and audience. The authors conclude by demonstrating how their own research strategies have resulted in culturally significant video documents that offer a contemporary snapshot of local knowledge. ”

“ Taking the position that oral literature such as narrative and song often serve as important cultural resources that retain and reinforce cultural values and group identity, Field demonstrates how American Indian trickster tales—like Aesop’s fables found in Europe—contain moral content, and are typically aimed at child audiences. ”

“ Their commitment to open access dovetails with our Project’s mandate to widen the dissemination of knowledge, ideas, and access to cultural traditions. Connecting with a broader audience—one that was historically disenfranchised by the exclusivity of print and the restrictive distribution networks that favoured Western readers—allows the protection of cultural knowledge. This is achieved through a better understanding of human diversity, and the return of digitised collections to source communities and countries of origin. ”

“ Considering the uses of her own fieldwork, Field explains that American Indian communities typically view their oral traditions as communal intellectual property. It is therefore incumbent upon researchers who work with traditional texts in oral communities to collaborate to ensure that collected texts are treated in a manner that is appropriate from the perspective of the communities of origin. ”

“ Globalisation and rapid socio-economic change exert particularly complex pressures on smaller communities of speakers, often eroding expressive diversity and transforming culture through assimilation to more dominant ways of life. ”

“ However, a resurgence of ethnic pride combined with increasing interest shown by governmental agencies in the safeguarding of cultural diversity are bringing native languages and oral practices to the foreground. ”

“ Openness, access and connectivity As editors of this volume, we are delighted to bring together these important contributions that reflect on the ethical practices of anthropological and linguistic fieldwork, digital archiving, and the repatriation of cultural materials. We believe that the widest possible dissemination of such work will help support the propagation of best practices to all who work in these fields. ”

“ Field reminds us that it is essential for researchers to bear in mind the relationship between the recording, publication, and archiving of oral literature, community preferences regarding these aspects of research, and considerations relating to language revitalisation. ”

“ For example, while a musicologist might study the instrumental technique of a traditional song, a linguist would focus on grammatical structures in the verse, and an anthropologist might explore the social meaning and cultural values conveyed through the lyrics. ”