HELP for Endangered Legacy Collections

Hi everyone! @JROSESLA and I wanted to let you all know about HELP for Endangered Legacy Collections and invite you to consider participating and/or sending it to people in your departments who may have or be in want of a collection of data on endangered languages.

HELP for Endangered Legacy Collections

A project sponsored by CELP and led by Kate Lindsey (klindsey@bu.edu) and Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada (jrosesla@ualberta.ca)

HELP for Endangered Legacy Collections is a new initiative from within the Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation (CELP) to assist in the digitization, archiving, and processing of endangered language data. This initiative attempts to tackle two concerns within our field: (1) the fact that many senior researchers nearing retirement need assistance in digitizing, archiving and processing their legacy collections of endangered language data and (2) the fact that there is an increasing number of graduate students who wish to undertake work on endangered languages but are not able to collect their own data due to a variety of reasons, e.g., travel restrictions (especially in the wake of the current global pandemic), lack of funding, family obligations, health concerns, and so on. Click here to learn more and fill out an interest survey to participate in the pilot phase of this new initiative.

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This is such an amazing idea! I hope you let us know how it goes and what lessons you learn because it would be great to see this replicated!

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Yes, amazing is the right way to put it! I can remember a lot of stories just from hanging around the Survey at Berkeley of Some of the many linguists Who had done work (especially on California languages) still living in the area and not depositing — not because they didn’t want to, but because they wanted to sort out their data better. The situation must be similar all over the world.

Please let us know how it goes!

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